Smart Adult Cruelty

The news that hunger-striking imprisoned migrants in Texas are now being force-fed, in clear violation of international human rights statutes against torture, is being greeted with a collective yawn from the adults in the Bipartisan Caucus For Sadistic Sanity.

It's not about the physical torture, you see. That is something that everyday Americans are not allowed to see on their TVs. Force-feeding is a really disturbing thing to witness, according to Human Rights Watch:

Force-feeding – which involves pushing a feeding tube down a patient’s nose – can be very painful and is inherently cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Medical ethics and human rights norms generally prohibit the force feeding of detainees who are competent and capable of rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food. A relative of two men being force-fed with nasal tubes by ICE told the AP the men are having persistent nose bleeds and vomiting several times a day.

Even Human Rights Watch is so squeamish that it initially refers to imprisoned migrants as "patients." 

 Meanwhile, the controversy that is truly roiling the media-political complex is the cruel semantics of the Trumpian wall-talk, and how they can overcome it. The obvious profitable solution to the current impasse between Democrats and Republicans over Trump's demand for a wall is simply to use the word "smart" when describing how to punish, track, harass, terrorize, torture, cage and deport brown-skinned people fleeing for their lives from some of the same countries the US has destabilized over decades of regime change and economic plunder. What adult in the room doesn't love technology?

His threats of an emergency declaration to force the military to construct a physical barrier notwithstanding, even Donald Trump is now reportedly eager to jump on the Smart Xenophobe bandwagon in order to save face after his various concrete and steel wall proposals all crumbled into dust last week with the temporary reopening of the government. As The Hill reports:

Tech companies are increasingly bullish on building a "smart wall," which would incorporate new technologies to beef up security on the southern border.
Many firms see a potential windfall with both Democrats and Republicans floating the idea of tech improvements as an alternative to President Trump's call for a steel barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Democrats have said they would back as much as $5.7 billion for a smart wall. Trump himself discussed the idea when announcing the deal to end the recent government shutdown.

Trump ruefully had to admit that walls and moats are medieval, whereas Reaper drones and cameras are modern and efficient and smart. This is especially true since the state of Israel is ready, willing and able to share its own long expertise in controlling the undesirable humans imprisoned in its open-air Palestinian gulag from breaching that border. One such company, Elbit Systems, is eager to line the entire Arizona-Mexico border not with Trump's dumb retrograde wall, but with a virtual barrier of smart modern towers decked out with radar and cameras.

Montana Senator Jon Tester wants to award a contract to a Montana company  for a long, snaking, smart underground wall of fiberoptic cable that would alert the border patrol every time somebody takes a step or even draws a trembling breath. This is not at all the same kind of corrupt bribery scheme as Trump conniving and colluding to build a luxury tower in Moscow. For one thing, it's smart legalized corruption.

The main catch to all this smartness and modernity, according to civil libertarians, is that US citizens will also unavoidably be caught up in the surveillance and the terror. No technology can differentiate upstanding American human citizens in border states from non-US humans, because nationality and race are not biological constructs. 

"Legal" residents of border states, therefore, might not like government drones constantly buzzing above their heads or watching facial recognition technology stations being installed in their backyards, even if it is for the profitable national security of unfettered multinational capitalists.

Smart experts insist it is only what people can actually see that can hurt and scare them and therefore endanger the security and profits of the multinational tech companies. Maybe once the experts can figure out how to make drones and surveillance towers as invisible as their torture chambers they'll have better luck winning over American hearts and minds.

The War Against Single Payer Intensifies

A recent poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that guaranteed single payer health coverage for every American is as popular than ever.

But much to its discredit, this respected foundation also used some pretty slimy "Harry and Louise"-style push-poll tactics in its survey in a seeming effort to tamp down the enthusiasm and give ammunition to opponents of Medicare For All.

 What if, the respondents were passive-aggressively asked, "they heard" that universal guaranteed insurance would lead to delays in diagnosis and treatment, and even to rationed care? Would they still want Medicare For All then?

 And what do you know: the enthusiasm for single payer suddenly dropped by a whopping 44 percentage points!

So, the inherent message is clear. People desirous of a nonprofit health care system enjoyed by every other civilized country in the world are not only befuddled, they are stubbornly set in their ways. It is not in the Kaiser pollsters' job description to inform their targets that alleged delays in treatment are simply right-wing talking points beneficial only to health care market privateers, and have little to no basis in fact.

The oft-repeated claims by Republicans of deadly, life-threatening waiting times in Canada, for example, are completely false. It's true that Canadians do have to wait longer than Americans for such elective surgeries as knee replacements and cataract removals. Even so, they have the option of paying out of pocket to a private provider if they so desire. Canadians in need of immediate care get immediate care. And on average, they live three years longer than Americans.

  The malign objective of the single payer naysayers in the Oligarchic States of America is to send the message, either directly or indirectly, that Medicare For All "might be" dangerous to your health. Better to stick with the reliable economy-busting, budget-crushing predatory arrangement that we already have. It sucks for sure, but at least it's better than a world full of known unknowns and unknown knowns. 

Anti-single payer pundits and politicians, meanwhile, are pouncing on Kaiser's manipulated poll results with barely contained glee. David Leonhardt of the New York Times even goes so far as to declare in his headline that Medicare For All is a "trap" for Democratic presidential contenders. They'd better be careful, or Trump might win.

It does not occur to Leonhardt to actually critique the negative push-polling inserted by Kaiser in its survey, using false information and scare tactics that are identical to those employed by such conservative, profit-driven think tanks and media outlets as the Heritage Foundation, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal. He simply repeats the propaganda, essentially warning candidates like Kamala Harris to be careful what they promise to fickle, stupid people who simply don't understand complicated stuff: 

Some 56 percent of respondents said they favored “a national plan called Medicare for All in which all Americans would get their insurance through a single government plan.” A large majority of Democrats backed the idea. Almost a quarter of Republicans did, too.
The poll’s details, however, were a lot of less positive about Medicare for All. In fact, they showed why single-payer health care may turn out to be one of the few problematic issues for Democrats heading into 2020 — if the party isn’t careful. Harris has highlighted the tensions this week, saying on Monday night that she supported the most aggressive version of Medicare for All before moderating her position, via aides, late yesterday.

It also does not seem to occur to Leonhardt that candidates who pander to voters on Medicare For All, only to cravenly walk back their support within hours via campaign flacks, as Kamala Harris did, are more apt to lose votes based upon their own shallowness and hypocrisy rather than on sincere, consistent advocacy for programs for the greater good.

Who knew that people finally getting peace of mind, no longer having to worry about going bankrupt or losing their home or dying prematurely because they can't afford treatment when they get sick or hurt, would be so "tense" and even worse, "problematic?"

To paraphrase Cindy Adams: Only in America, kiddo. Only in America.

Smart Plutocrats, Dumb Trumpocrats

Don't you hate it when the rich and powerful can't all just get along? 

The plutes have really been blowing it lately. Their standard operating procedure of pitting the hoi polloi against each other in a never-ending orgy of divide-and-conquer, while at the same time craftily plundering the same hoi polloi of every last dollar and drop of sweat-labor they possess, is showing signs of some serious wear and tear.

 Having been carefully trained to fear and respect - if not love - the plutocrats, and to strive, as a top-secret Citigroup manifesto once put it, to become "pluto-participants" in the enterprise, the hoi polloi are getting wise to the con. The propaganda center can no longer hold. Strikes and protests and riots are breaking out all over the place: in Los Angeles, in Mexico, in France, to name just three in the last week alone.

The plutocrats, in the process of losing their propaganda war if not their actual class war on anybody with no money, appear to be losing their minds at about the same rate that the hoi polloi are losing their patience.

Unable any longer to keep their bickering and their palace intrigues behind closed gilded doors, the ruling class is desperately trying to salvage dwindling hoi polloi compliance and good will by at least letting us gawk at their sordid end-of-empire show as it plays out in real time.

Entertain yourselves from the nosebleed seats as the royal battle between the stupid, crass plutocrats (Trumpocrats) and the smart, sensitive plutocrats plays out. Root for your favorite stars. Stay tuned for the coming attractions in Horse Race 2020 if you ever find yourself unaccountably losing enthusiasm for the thrilling main event.

The lead actors now playing the Stupids for our entertainment misery are President Donald Trump and his commerce secretary, Wilbur "Mr. Burns" Ross. They've far, far exceeded all expectations in their roles as gross cartoon villains in the first exciting installment of Shutdown USA. These two human malignancies had craftily advised the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors working without pay for the better part of a month to simply take out a loan - just in case those form letters the White House thoughtfully provided, begging for mercy from landlords, mortgage companies and other creditors, didn't do the trick.

Enter the lead actress, intrepid multimillionaire centrist Nancy Pelosi, to save the day for the Smart Plutocrat Team. In the latest episode's exciting climax, Madam Speaker boldly forces Trump to cave and to call a temporary truce, ending the shutdown. She is being widely praised by the fawning corporate media reviewers as a feminist bad-ass in heels. Not only does she deny Trump his Wall, but perhaps even more painful to him personally, she denies him his coveted prime time spot as star of the annual State of the Union gala.

  And she'll spend the next three weeks continuing to show the whole intimidated world what a primitive wimp he is by altruistically offering him billions of dollars for "a smart wall." This means that Democrats will push for more humane, high-tech ways to terrorize and punish migrants and refugees, while Pelosi further shows her chops by tamping down all those pesky rumblings of Medicare For All in her caucus. There are just no billions of extra dollars to spare for "smart" hoi polloi health, apparently. 

Because no way is Nancy Pelosi ever content to just clutch her pearls like the Democratic #Resistance Fighter of yore. She wears them like a studded collar, like the warrior queen and de facto first woman president that she truly is. Elevating her to such regal status allows the corporate media to ignore the fact that massive labor unrest and sick-ins at the nation's airports was a disruption that even the Trumpocrats couldn't ignore.

I know it's hard to surpass Pelosi's brilliant bravura performance, but it seems that there is another eager ruling class racketeer lurking in the wings. So getting second billing in this week's Smart Plutocrat lineup is multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is pondering his own primary run as a Democrat, based primarily upon his claim that he's a smarter CEO than Trump.

Skillfully exposing Trump as the poor negotiator and klutzy psychopath that he is, Bloomberg did him one better and showed that not only is he, Bloomberg, a smarter overlord, he is a plutocrat who can also do noblesse oblige whenever the rare need arises. Not content to merely employ the royal "we" to show that he is not amused, he also employs pop culture references and humor to show that he's down with the hoi polloi.

"The longer we have a pretend CEO who is recklessly running this country, the worse it’s going to be for our economy and for our security. This is really dangerous.... It’s like the government version of a bad horror movie, but instead of Freddy Krueger and the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ we’ve got Donald Trump and the ‘Nightmare at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.'"

Trump wonders as he wanders. Bloomberg panders as he ponders. Therefore, we can forgot all about the nightmare of his three-term New York City mayoralty, highlighted by his edict that all food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as though they were criminals. And speaking of bad dreams, his "Stop and Frisk" crusade of city cops terrorizing virtually every single black and brown male existing within his domain lasted for years before a judge finally declared it to be inhumane and unconstitutional. Unlike the oafish Trump, Bloomberg is a smart, competent sadist capable of keeping his cruelty carefully hidden beneath platitudes. He's more like smarmy circumspect innkeeper Norman Bates than boastful slasher Freddy Krueger.

Meanwhile, you will be happy to know that despite all their unprecedented smartness, Bloomberg and Pelosi already face some more stiff competition. Because otherwise it wouldn't be a true democracy, would it? 

As Hillary Clinton just informed her PAC subscribers in a missive slugged "Let's not be distracted," she, Bill, Chelsea, and 500 of their closest public-private partners will burn untold tens of thousands of gallons of climate-destroying private jet fuel to convene this week in San Juan to discuss all the neoliberal ways that they can make Puerto Rico an even better and smarter de facto colony than it was before Hurricane Maria destroyed it, and Trump insulted its residents by throwing paper towels at them.

Unlike Trump, Hillary doesn't crassly throw stuff. (She also doesn't crassly announce her third presidential candidacy, preferring instead to send out sensitive feelers to gauge the reaction.) She does, as is her wont, always put her own grievances first, even placing herself above suffering Puerto Ricans in making her email pitch. Never mind island mudslides. The Clinton Foundation, she altruistically announces in the very first paragraph of her email, has been the victim of much mud-slinging from the dumb Trumpocrats:

When I ran for president, this top-rated global charity was dragged into a political mud fight. In the two years since, people with an axe to grind have continued to try to undermine its work by attacking them (sic) and making false accusations.

 So combine your outraged solidarity-pity for Hillary and your hatred of Donald Trump with concern for Puerto Ricans  and try, ironical as it might sound, to "resist the vitriol" and stop being so distracted by Trump's dumb oafish antics. Instead, give generously to the Clintons so that they, rather than US government agencies funded by raising taxes on the rich, can help the entire "greater Caribbean" to "build back better" via "practical solutions."

Although she offered few details on exactly what this practicality will entail, and no information at all about the confab's 500 attendees, Hillary Clinton does allow that one of her biggest concerns is the alleged "rising youth crime rate" in Puerto Rico. Her idea of bringing these youths to heel is "access" to mental health care and entrepreneurship training... making Puerto Rico great again and safe again, especially for tourists. 

She made no mention of raising the minimum wage in Puerto Rico, which Congress in its infinitely smart wisdom had reduced to $4.25 an hour for workers below age 24 the year before Maria hit. It was a common-sense austerity measure designed to placate the indebted commonwealth's bond holders, a very smart bunch of plutocrats indeed. Maybe some of them are even smart enough to be among the Clinton Foundation's group of 500 carbon-belching island rescuers.

Update 1/28: Just as I was finishing up this post last night, billionaire and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz officially announced on 60 Minutes that he is seriously thinking about an independent presidential candidacy, fomenting enough buzz in the media-political complex to preclude their cravings for his overpriced caffeine beverages. 

Schultz, while posing as a smart plutocratic centrist, actually betrays his inner dumb crass authoritarian Trump when he says that he wants "America to win."

This should be interesting if it lasts. If Schultz can buy his way into the corporate-sponsored debates as an independent candidate, then it will be harder for the Duopoly to deny other third, fourth and fifth parties the same privilege. I don't think the police would dare chain Schultz to a chair in a warehouse as they did to the Green Party's Jill Stein when she showed up to debate Obama and Romney in 2012.

Robert Mueller, Father of Our Country

The name of this country is the United States of Oz, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller III has been operating the gears behind his secret curtain for going on two years now. The fate of renegade President Donald Trump, as well as the fate of the whole nation, rests in Mueller's hands, and his hands alone. Or so we are told, day in and day out, by the political-media complex.

Absent a competent president with a popular mandate who possesses traditional authoritarian qualities and the respect accruing thereto, Mueller has stepped into the breach. Unlike a traditional elected leader, Mueller exercises unaccountable, undemocratic power. He is thus so paradoxically vulnerable, by dint of his own lack of a public persona and mandate, that a weak and corrupt Congress must also craft special legislation to protect Their Man Behind the Curtain.

Mueller's very invisibility has fomented the growth of his own Authoritarian Personality Cult, composed of some of those traditional, mythical presidential qualities so sorely lacking in Donald Trump's more public personality cult.

The Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève differentiated four kinds of power-wielding pure authority: that of father over children, that of master over slaves, that of judge of civic behavior, and that of leader of state and party. An ideal president or prime minister must possess all four of these qualities, or at least be able to present a reasonable fascimile of them: paternal disciplinarian and soother-in-chief, mature and selfless pragmatist, bully pulpit moralizer, and the setter of his own party's platform or agenda.

Kojeve could have been talking about Donald Trump when he wrote how the "leader of the band" rather than "leader of the state" type of primitive authority can supersede the more "enlightened" kinds in the rise of totalitarian regimes: 

A band of kids gathers to play. One of these kids proposes to go and steal apples from the orchard next door. Immediately by doing so, he casts himself in the role of the band's leader. He became this leader because he saw further than the others, because it was he alone who thought out a project, while the others did not manage to get beyond the level of immediate facts.

Every time that Trump bellows "build the wall" or "lock her up" at one of his rallies, the band of kids in the audience roars its approval, just as the crowd roars its approval every time he counters the elite discourse of more qualified corrupt politicians with his personal insults and disdain of facts. He won the election because he "got" the anger and disgust of the electorate, while the others did not.

So there's this uncomfortable vacuum. Trump is the opposite of loving father, the opposite or moral arbiter, the antithesis of Solomon of Biblical judicial fame. And although Mueller does partially fill the acceptable authoritarian vacuum as benevolent judge, jury and executioner, the natives are getting restless. Teachers are striking, democratic socialist upstarts are getting elected to Congress and too many people are demanding universal health care and taxes on the rich.

Since supplemental physical and verbal authority is sorely needed to augment the strong silent Mueller mystique and to oppressively placate the restive and frightened public, enter the forces of the national security state (the FBI and the CIA) as adjuncts if not full partners of the "opposition" Democratic Party.  Law enforcement personnel and spies have effectively taken over the cable propaganda networks and corporate print publications in order to become the public relations "face" of the anti-Trump resistance, as we all wait with baited breath for Robert Mueller's own final word as some sort of Second Coming of Christ.

That Mueller is, in fact, a totalitarian corporate leader in his own right was made painfully clear by the media's cowed reaction to his "rare" pronouncement last Friday (albeit through an Emerald City gate-keeper) that the BuzzFeed scoop claiming that his office possessed documentary evidence proving that Trump had instructed his former fixer to lie to Congress was not accurate.

The media reaction to Mueller's terse pronouncement was swift and it was chastened. If the Man Behind the Curtain refutes something, then his must be the final word. At most, the deferential media are presuming to beg our wonderful paternalistic wizard to please, Sir, explain to us exactly what was not accurate about the Bombshell. 

Even brown-nosing "veteran journalists" are confused by the paternalistic rebuke from on high behind the curtain, finding it hard to square with BuzzFeed's own insistence (aping the "high confidence" of the Security State in it own myriad unproven RussiaGate allegations) that it has "high confidence" in the accuracy of its own reporting.

CNN's Brian "Reliable Sources" Stelter jumped to the Wizard's defense, accusing BuzzFeed of acting "shockingly casual" toward Mueller when it first asked him to comment on the latest allegations.

Meanwhile, somewhat shockingly, the Columbia Journalism Review seems to diverge from the narrative as it warns reporters to start acting like journalists instead of Mueller personality cultists:

But commentators should be careful not to treat the special counsel’s office—whose inner workings are opaque—as the infallible, benevolent voice of God. In any case, the statement neither kills the central essence of the story (it does not take a position on whether Trump did, in fact, tell Cohen to lie), nor specifies exactly what Mueller thinks BuzzFeed got wrong.

Well, maybe not so shocking after all, because the CJR's criticism of Mueller is not so much pushback against the special prosecutor's power as it is reflective of the disappointment among the media operatives of the RussiaGate franchise that one more "blockbuster that changed everything" story turned out be a dud. Because maybe it's not really a dud at all, but only a delayed explosion. Where there's relentless propaganda, there's always hope. Faces must be saved.

Mueller is a de facto dictator because not only does he elicit fawning respect from the press, his presence also serves to frighten Trump and his band of kleptocrats from doing anything too criminally outrageous and discourages incipient criminals from accepting White House job offers to further their own interests. Most important, Mueller usurps Congress's constitutional mandate of oversight - with, of course, the full permission and complicity of Congress. The legislative branch, while planning its own piecemeal investigations of the Trump administration, readily admits that it clears the probes with Mueller first, not wishing to step on his toes or interfere with his own work.

Dead silence, meanwhile, emanates from Dad's Den. The Wizard tinkers on, operating his legal gears, protected from public gaze and scrutiny. Talk of impeachment ebbs, flows, recedes and rises again in regular little wavelets. The faux-Resistance media can barely contain themselves, gnashing their teeth over their increasingly debunked RussiaGate narratives, but ravenously ready to devour the next "plant" about Trump malfeasance from anonymous sources within the national police security state -- sources who, if not among Mueller's own top-secret team of investigators, are at least operating in tandem with them.

No matter that Trump damages the world and the people in it a little (really, rather a lot) more every day. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and one insidious form of totalitarianism is doing battle with another.

Why else would the Ruling Class continue using the right-wing former FBI director and Iraq War architect and the authoritarian Police Security State as their Resistance? Why would they continue accusing Trump of treason, yet unaccountably allow him to stay in office more than two years after Putin allegedly installed him in the Oval Office with cheesy Facebook ads? They will do whatever it takes to maintain their grip on their own record wealth, using the police state as their propagandists and news sources at least until the lesser evil corporate Democrats can take up the slack and further fill the authoritarian vacuum with their endless identity-intensive campaigning and debates and a record number of candidates. Who knows, perhaps one of them will defeat Trump in 2020. 

And if they don't, it won't affect the oligarchs one way or another. Trump has only ever been a symptom, the end-stage product of malevolent capitalism long disguised as representative democracy.

And whoever said irony is dead doesn't remember this bloodthirsty neoconservative 2003 exhortation from the Bush regime:

"We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

--- Robert S. Mueller III, quoting Ephesians 6:12-18, to make the case for the illegal invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deaths, dismemberments and displacements of hundreds of thousands of people, both civilian and military.

Inspiration Blues

A commenter on this blog challenged me this morning to talk about something positive or learned for a change. 

I don't know about the "learned" part, but I think the New York Times comment I wrote last night on Paul Krugman's latest ode to the wonderful Democratic Party was pretty damned positive. 

Pushing his own glass half-full scenario in the midst of the government shutdown, he lavished great praise upon Gavin Newsom, the new and untested governor of California, and applauded all-blue New Jersey's strict enforcement of the Obamacare rule that everybody must buy private, for-profit health insurance, or face tax penalties. The result of this mass extortion is that the extortion is more broad-based, and premiums have come down.

 But even better, one of the bluest of all blue states (Washington) now has a public option supplement to the private insurance cartel, thus absolving the still-thriving cartel from using more of its record profits to treat the sickest of the sick, instead passing on such costs to the taxpaying public while cartel CEOs pocket the difference in stock buy-back schemes. 

And on the other liberal coast, New York City Mayor Bill di Blasio even wants to build more affordable housing in the Wealth Disparity Capital of the Universe and provide more access to medical care!

Therefore, there was no need for Krugman to even mention the Los Angeles teachers' strike, the housing crisis, and the continued and growing public demand for non-profit Medicare For All. Because Democrats sure know how to govern, unlike those nasty old Republicans.

My published response to Krugman's column: 

Why no shout-out to the striking L.A. teachers exerting such effective pressure on the new governor and other Democrats? Without the resurgent labor movement, it'd be business as usual, even in the bluest of blue locales. Forty children per classroom is a shame in such a rich state, home to many a Silicon Valley and Hollywood billionaire and mogul.

 Bill di Blasio isn't making new proposals for better health care and low-income housing just out of the goodness of his heart. It's taken citizens with the courage to confront him at his gym workouts, cell phone cameras at the ready, over the shameful conditions in the city's public housing projects as well as the homeless crisis. Although he's made strides in the construction of more "affordable" housing, NYC's homeless numbers are still at near-record highs.

The homeless also just happen to have their own Coalition.

 If Dems are moving left and finally beginning to abandon austerity, it's because the public is forcing them to.

Regarding health care: individual states implementing public options is no substitute for a federally administered single payer system. The House majority thus far is only paying lip service to Medicare For All, with the chairwoman of the relevant subcommittee, Anna Eshoo, just announcing that she might not have time to hold hearings after all. She represents Silicon Valley, home of many a tech billionaire.

 So a Women's March group plans to storm Congress on Friday to demand Single Payer.

We have miles to go before we sleep.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the DNC has disassociated itself from the Women's March for more reasons than just the alleged anti-Semitism of one or two of its founders. Protesters are branching off from the original Democratic-centric/centrist intent of the enterprise, independently evolving far beyond simply "resisting" Trump and the Republicans. Good.)

"If True..."

*Updated below.

It's another bombshell to end all bombshells: two of those anonymous FBI sources told the sometimes-reliable BuzzFeed News that Donald Trump had personally instructed his convicted former fixer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the failed bribery attempt to build another Trump Tower in Moscow. This is despite the fact the president has readily admitted this attempt happened while he was actively running for the presidency and well-positioned to win the nomination if not the actual election.

Like any savvy businessman, Trump had to keep all his options open. It's the all-American way.

The reason that this is such a bombshell, according to BuzzFeed, is that for the very first time, Trump didn't bother to use a variant of wink-and-nod Mafia code to protect himself, via the plausible deniability route, but specifically instructed his minion to lie, lie and lie again, both vocally and in writing.  

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
But Cohen's testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.

And here Trump was, openly colluding with the Pentagon just the other day on a new multi-billion dollar "Star Wars" initiative. Little did he know that BuzzFeed would try to ruin the latest diversionary tactic by cadging the marketing slogan of the cheaper Star Trek franchise. Forget about space being the final frontier. Cohen's utterly reliable testimony is now the official newest frontier of the bombshell to end all bombshells Russiagate franchise.

Just when you thought the crater couldn't get any deeper, it gets deeper. It's the crater that will change everything.  

Still, absent the concurrent leakage of any actual alleged "cache of documents," members of the seamlessly joined political-media complex are also keeping their own options open, salivating over and promoting the story while being very careful to preface their glee with the standard avalanche of "if this is true" caveats.

"If this is true," discreetly said former Attorney General Eric Holder, "then Congress must start impeachment proceedings." Because not only will Trump have obstructed justice, he will have suborned perjury. Cohen is expected to testify to Congress on Feb. 7th about what he claims he knew and when he claims he knew it. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, meanwhile, vows he will do everything possible to find out if the BuzzFeed story is true. Good luck suborning the First Amendment to demand from the reporters the identities of their two anonymous FBI agents.

As a sidelight, Trump's nominee for attorney general, William Barr, told congressional inquisitors this week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's own report on Russiagate may never even be made public. This suppression would presumably be done to protect other innocent guilty parties in Trumpworld and beyond.

It will also conveniently tie Congress's hands regarding an impeachment and trial. The "resistance fighters" of the opposition party have already stated that they are loath to do anything that might ham-handedly interfere with Mueller's ever-so-delicate and selective surgical probings into whether Trump's long history of sleaze actually translates into his being a treasonous witting or unwitting Putin puppet.

The same Democrats who have been relentlessly promoting the Russiagate propaganda -  our democracy is under attack by the Kremlin! - for the past two years are now professing to be alarmed that Trump wants to start a new Cold War with the Kremlin via his space weapons missile "defense" gambit. It seems like only yesterday they were professing themselves alarmed that Trump was being too chummy with Putin. Actually, they are still professing themselves to be alarmed over two mutually contradictory things. Maybe nobody will even notice, especially the talking heads of the corporate cable TV propaganda mills.

Sure sounds like collusion to me. But it's probably neither completely witting nor completely unwitting. If true, it's more like half-witting.  

*Update, 1/19. If what Mueller's office says is true, then the BuzzFeed bombshell is a complete dud. This, according to the Russiagate franchise, is mighty confusing, because the special counsel spokesman didn't specify exactly what isn't true. Is it a lie that Trump ordered Cohen to lie, or did the secret FBI sources lie to BuzzFeed, and furthermore, Mueller should just go ahead and release the cache of documents BuzzFeed breathlessly reported on without seeing them or otherwise verifying their alleged existence.

As the HuffPo is reporting, this is all too confusing. It has morphed from the bombshell to end all bombshells into a frantic roller coaster ride with a three-way fight in mid-air among BuzzFeed, Trump and Mueller.

So far, as far as I know, nobody in the Russiagate franchise has yet accused Mueller of being a Putin puppet, a closet Trumpie, or an unwitting Russian stooge.

Tattered Ears On Pussy Hats

It's getting so internally divisive in the Big Tent that the Democratic National Committee has taken the draconian step of removing its official support for this weekend's Women's March.

The movement is so riven that in New York City, there will be two competing marches 50 blocks apart. One of these "grassroots" efforts, reports the New York Times, is being led by a former Goldman Sachs executive with no prior organizing experience and who is being accused by disability advocates of refusing to accommodate them. Therefore, disabled women will hold their own rally on Saturday.

According to the HuffPo, the DNC is no longer listed among the national movement's corporate sponsors, ostensibly because some of the march's organizers have refused to distance themselves from Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam founder who has long been accused of anti-Semitism. As a result, other corporate party-affiliated entities, such as EMILY's List, have also pulled their support.

But true to wishy-washy form,

A spokeswoman for the DNC declined to comment on the timing in a statement to The Daily Beast, but said women were at the "core of our Democratic Party."
"The DNC stands in solidarity with all those fighting for women's rights and holding the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers across the country accountable.... Women are on the front lines of fighting back against this administration." 

Until the Farrakhan controversy erupted, it had always been perfectly O.K. for the corporate Democrats to "fight back" against Trump-style xenophobia while keeping perfectly mum about their own. 

To wit: the original march organizers were horrified that the Watergate Hotel had allowed Russians to rent rooms there. The group's stated solidarity across gender, class,ethnic and racial lines always had its limits, even at the very beginning of #Resistance, Inc.

As Women's March leader Mariam Ehari wrote in Together We Rise, a 2017 memoir of the initial march, whose proceeds allegedly were donated to groups promoting human rights and global understanding:

I kept running into Trump supporters and many Russians in the hotel and thought, Is this real?

The Russians must have formed a caravan or something, sneaking across the border of the luxury hotel with their Cyrillic alphabets and their tupperware containers of Strogonoff. It must have been a real ethnic nightmare for the women's march leaders, who were nothing if not early pioneers of the #Russiagate propaganda franchise... in the Watergate, no less! Notice how Russians and Trump supporters magically become pretty much the same thing in that one little sentence?

As organizer Tamika Mallory - currently under fire for claiming that Jewish people bear "a collective special responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people" - lamented two years ago in Together We Rise, there was "so much hate coming at us from so many different directions. Being in the hotel with Trump supporters wasn't easy... It was almost like we were in a bubble."

Bingo. The vaunted solidarity and inclusiveness of this Democratic Party offshoot was always something of a fraud, right from the get-go. It was just another iteration of the "Us Vs Them" paranoia sold to the masses by the oligarchic ruling class in control of both establishment political parties. 

 But so long as the phobia was aimed at the right wrong people for the first couple of years of the Pussy Hat Resistance, nobody cared.

The only true solidarity among the organizers appears to be their mutual hatred of Donald Trump and sorrow over Hillary Clinton's defeat. It turns out that pure hatred and fear, absent any accompanying cohesive agenda for radical reform and social justice, is simply not sustainable.

Even after they'd hired more than 50 off-duty FBI agents to guard them against the the Deplorables and the Russkies, the original March organizers still didn't feel completely safe, according to the account in Together We Rise. If only they'd known that the FBI would soon be starting its own renegade national security investigation of Trump, they might have felt a whole lot better. 

And if you're wondering where Hillary Clinton stands amidst all this divisive angst, rest assured. She's offering you - and a friend - the very slim chance to spend some quality time with her. 

And you don't even have to march or otherwise exert yourself beyond giving her your credit card number! It sounds absolutely confabulous:

Pinch yourself, pack your favorite pantsuit and pick a friend, because you’re off to NYC to join Hillary Clinton for an evening you’ll never forget. Hillary’s inviting you to share in one of her favorite pastimes: seeing a Broadway show! And the fun won’t stop at curtain call. You’ll also join Hillary for a glass of chardonnay (or whatever you want!) for the chance to get to know her on a personal level. Maybe you’ll talk about the show, life, or your family. Maybe you’ll have a really nuanced conversation about economic policy. Maybe you’ll just use the opportunity to say, “thank you.” It’s up to you! But we hear Hillary’s an incredible listener. Flights and hotel included.

Who Needs Pink Pussy Hats or Even Pink Elephants? I Got Me a Blue Man!