And the Winner Is...

If you're a Hillary fan, Hillary won the debate. If you're a Bernie fan, Bernie won the debate. If you're a Lincoln Chafee fan, I can give you the name of a very good therapist.

 Even within the suffocating confines of the Democratic machine, last night's debate was practically Lincoln-Douglas compared to the recent Republican circuses. And I give high marks to moderator Anderson Cooper, who was somehow able to resist asking the candidates who they'd like to see on the $10 bill.

The mass media are, of course, making gleeful hay out of Clinton's attack on Bernie's gun control record. Er... make that gun "safety" record. The Democrats no longer talk about actually controlling guns, because that might hurt the feelings of responsible, liberal gun owners. The emphasis is now upon restricting gun sales to the happiest, most mentally healthy well-adjusted people out there, those who carefully keep their Sig Sauers locked up in designer cabinets rather than leaving their shotguns propped upon against the wall of a red state trailer for the kids to get hold of and shoot each other over puppies.

For whatever reason, Bernie did not go on the counterattack. He did not, for example, point out that Hillary Clinton sold $20 billion worth of lethal weapons to Saudi Arabia while she was Secretary of State, and that Saudi royals then turned around and donated nearly $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. He didn't point out that Saudi Arabia is using these weapons to kill thousands of Yemeni civilians as well as continuing to behead dissidents and stone women to death in their own country. 

As Bernie himself unfortunately admitted, he is no "pacifist." He would continue Obama's drone policy of rendering Muslims into bug-splat. And even though he was the sole Senator to vote against the Patriot Act, he still believes that patriot Ed Snowden should face criminal charges. He did not refute Hillary's specious claim that Snowden would have found justice by going through Congressional channels instead of giving evidence of government spying to the media.

So since Bernie can't or won't, let's talk more about Hillary Clinton's horrible record on guns and all manner of high tech weaponry. David Sirota should have been invited to help moderate the debate, because he conducted a thorough analysis of her record just last spring, when she was busily riding in her Scooby van and shmoozing the scripted neoliberal love to "everyday Americans":

The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.

Under Clinton's leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure -- derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) -- represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.

In other words, the Clintons are major arms dealers who, in a reality-based world, would be given an A+ rating by the NRA -- on top of their A+ ratings from Wall Street war profiteers and defense contractors.

But this is an insane world presented to us as fair and balanced and mentally healthy by corporate media hacks whose jobs depend upon the successful alteration of our reality. According to the New York Times, Hillary "turned up the heat" on Bernie so much that they might as well have reported that his hair caught fire and he had to flee the Vegas kitchen. According to the Huffington Post, she crushed him into bug-splat with the merest flick of her pinkie finger. (OK, so he later recovered sufficiently to feebly wave a surviving tentacle in her general direction.)  The Washington Post proclaimed that Hillary towered like an Amazon over the sniveling guys flanking her on the stage. She was "fluid, steady and calm" to Bernie Sanders' maniacal shouting into a microphone, sniffed Dana Milbank.

I haven't yet read all the reviews, but so far, a puff piece by former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is the one that really takes the cake. From his current perch atop the op-ed page, he gushed in his typical one-sentence paragraphs: 

I never doubted that Hillary Clinton had many talents.

I just didn’t know that seamstress was among them.

There were moments in the first Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday night when she threaded the needle as delicately and perfectly as a politician could.

Wait. It gets worse:

 He seemed bowed, irascible. She seemed buoyant, effervescent. It was as poised a performance as she’s finessed in a long time, and while I’ve just about given up making predictions about this confounding election — I never thought Donald Trump would last so long, and I never saw Ben Carson coming — I think Clinton benefited more from Tuesday’s stage than Sanders did.

How is one bowed (crushed) and irascible (feisty) at the same time? I have just about given up on making any sense out of Frank Bruni. But wait. It gets even worser:

And she benefited from the visual contrast when she stood side by side on TV next to Sanders, with his slight hunch, his somewhat garbled style of speech, and a moment when he cupped his hand behind his ear, signaling that he hadn’t heard the question.

He evoked yesterday. Despite many decades in the political trenches, she didn’t. It was a nifty trick. Turns out she’s a bit of a sorceress as well.

Bernie apparently does not speak in the pristine Bruniesque one-sentence paragraphs that make up the ideal word salad. But speaking of sorceresses, who are, I suppose, good witches as opposed to hags (Hillary at least puts the bubble back into toil and trouble), here is my published response to Brunhilda:

 Come on now. Did anybody really expect the paper of record and a centrist columnist to declare Bernie Sanders the winner of this debate? The corporate media, Frank Bruni included, have been bending over backward to avoid even mentioning the guy's name. They seem not to have a clue about the mood in this country.

The resounding campaign theme way out here in the sticks is "It's the Corruption, Stupid!" Not about who is the most polished debater with the best hair and makeup, the most nuanced wonky talking points, the straightest posture, and the most discreet hearing aid.

Yes, Hillary Clinton performed very well at the Democratic debate. She has had 26 of them in which to hone her skills -- unlike in this season, when the Democratic leadership is so rattled at the prospect of ABH (Anybody But Hillary) that they drastically limited them to six (the rest coming on weekends and holiday seasons.) So I bet Debbie Wasserman Schultz is kicking herself, seeing as how Hillary had a relatively easy time of it last night.

 And I can only imagine how thrilled Hillary must be that Frank Bruni's idea of a rave review is to call her a talented seamstress. Can a description of a female politician get any more chauvinistically 19th century than that? Not only does Bruni need a Miracle Ear to cure his tone-deafness, a transfer to the Style Section might be in order as well.

And by the way -- the USA turning into Denmark on steroids sounds like an excellent plan to me.

The Wonder of Plunder

No holiday is as quintessentially US American as Columbus Day, that grotesque combination of consumerism and parades and nostalgia for the good old days of colonialism and ethnic cleansing. And because fervid nationalistic myths die so hard, it is all the more refreshing to learn that several more cities have now coupled the pathological worship of a Renaissance vulture capitalist with their own Indigenous Peoples' Days.

From The Guardian;

As the US observes Columbus Day on Monday, it will also be Indigenous Peoples Day in at least nine cities, including Albuquerque; Portland, Oregon; St Paul, Minnesota; and Olympia, Washington.Encouraged by city council votes in Minneapolis and Seattle last year, Native American activists made a push in dozens of cities in recent months to get local leaders to officially recognise the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples Day. Their success was mixed.

The campaigns say the federal holiday honoring Christopher Columbus – and the parades and pageantry accompanying it – overlooks a painful history of colonialism, enslavement, discrimination and land grabs that followed the Italian explorer’s 1492 arrival in the Americas.

The indigenous holiday takes into account the history and contributions of Native Americans for a more accurate historical record, activists have argued.

If Columbus Day is quintessentially US-ian, then so too is false equivalence. Five hundred years later, activists find themselves having to argue over the historical record, as though history were debatable. Facts are such controversial things.

As  Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz explains in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, "Origin narratives form the vital core of a people's unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land. That part of the origin story is supported and reinforced by the Columbus myth and the 'Doctrine of Discovery.' According to a series of late fifteenth century papal bulls, European nations acquired title to the lands they 'discovered' and the Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it."

And from the quintessential Howard Zinn:

To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

It is no accident that Columbus "discovered" America at the same time that the Spanish Inquisition was in full throttle, and Ferdinand, Isabella and Torquemada were also busily expelling or converting Jews, and deporting Muslims, and burning heretics at the stake. Subjugation of peoples around the globe is still very much in the DNA of the ruling elites. Columbus Day will be abolished over their cold, dead, pampered bodies.

Not for nothing has the image of Columbus been transgendered into a beneficent goddess in paintings, sculptures, and corporate logos. An Ivy League university is named after a plunderer. So too is a sportswear company and a space shuttle. "Hail, Columbia" is the entrance march for the US vice president. CBS, one of the six major media conglomerates, is the acronym for the Columbia Broadcasting System. Columbia Pictures is a major Hollywood studio. And so on and so forth.

Columbia Pictures Logo

And not for nothing is the power center of the US imperium located in the richest, most corrupt place in the entire country: Washington, District of Columbia. The goals of the 21st century ruling class are still so essentially Columbian: globalization for the purposes of extracting slave labor and mineral wealth. The Columbian spirit is very deeply embedded in the top-secret plunderous pages of both the Trans-Pacific and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnerships. 

President Obama (Columbia-'83) let his own inner Columbus shine through in his latest weekly address: 

With this Trans-Pacific Partnership, we are writing the rules for the global economy.  America is leading in the 21st century.  Our workers will be the ones who get ahead.  Our businesses will get a fair deal.  And those who oppose passing this new trade deal are really just accepting a status quo that everyone knows puts us at a disadvantage.

The Spanish royals used much the same line as they sent forth Columbus and their subsequent armies of conquistadors to rewrite the rules of the global economy. Isabella remained a popular ruler as she held her own weekly audiences with her subjects. Meanwhile, Spain went so deeply into debt via global colonialism that its empire declined and fell, as empires always do.
 
Still, Columbus must be writhing with pleasure in his grave as the parade of capitalism marches on and on, heedless of the global havoc it wreaks.

And conservative Catholics are still pressing the cause of his sugar-mommy  Isabella for sainthood, a movement that collapsed during the 500th anniversary celebrations of the "discovery." Apparently the queen has been unable to perform the requisite miracles, such as revising history as successfully as US textbook writers and politicians.

Commentariat Central

I've been remiss in reposting my New York Times comments, mainly because I've also been remiss in actually writing New York Times comments. To honor your requests, here are some of my replies to various articles, dating back as far as last month, and in no particular order:

Paul Theroux, The Hypocrisy of 'Helping' the Poor:

 "Philanthrocapitalism" is one of the many ways that the rich get richer. It's an orchestrated attempt by oligarchs to discourage the politicians they own from raising their taxes. It pre-empts direct government aid to the poor.

If the rich didn't make so much money and gain so much influence by "giving," then they wouldn't be playing the game.

To many of them, helping the poor equates with controlling the poor. They wield their power by dividing the Deserving from the Undeserving Poor. Their noblesse oblige is not only undemocratic. It's anti-democratic. 

 Much plutocratic charity goes to elite universities and think tanks studying the poor from a distance, or to their own tax-exempt foundations. For example, Warren Buffett is giving away his billions, not directly to the needy, but directly to the Gates Foundation. Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation - besides concentrating on such worthy causes as polio eradication - has expanded its own financial empire into privatizing schools, funding Common Core, conducting teacher evaluations via corporations, inserting its own software into crumbling schools.

Paul Theroux tells it like it is. Enough with allowing obscenely rich people to stroke their egos by "raising awareness" through their platitudinous hashtag slogans and photo-ops.

Charity shouldn't be allowed to supplant or replace good public policy and programs.

 Tax the rich. Tax them good and hard.

So much of this charity is nothing but legalized money-laundering. 

***

Neil Irwin, How Hillary Would Regulate Wall Street:

  Neil Irwin writes that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had less to do with causing the financial crisis than liberals suggest.

Granted, its repeal was not the only cause of the banking collapse. But it was indeed part and parcel of several deregulatory measures spawned by the neoliberal project, of which Bill Clinton was a main architect and enabler.

Besides the Glass-Steagall repeal, he also signed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which deregulated credit default swaps. He loosened lending rules via the Community Reinvestment Act, which paved the way for the subprime predatory lending epidemic and the subsequent foreclosure/fraudclosure free-for-all for which the too big to fails not only got a free pass, it made them even richer and bigger.

To be fair to Clinton, the repeal of Glass-Steagall effectively just gave retroactive immunity to Citigroup and other behemoths, who'd essentially been flouting the rules for years.

So bringing back Glass-Steagall would not be the miracle cure for what ails us. It would be far better to follow the advice of Sanders and Warren and just break up the banks as well as bringing back Glass-Steagall. Prosecuting and jailing financial crooks is also a must.

Hillary's nibbling around the edges of an oligarchy gone wild gives aid and comfort to the enemy. You don't hear Wall Street howling with pain over her tepid proposals, do you?

***
Paul Krugman, Dewey, Cheatham and Howe: 

 Jeb is selling himself as the perfect mattress for coddled corporations and plutocrats seeking sweet dreams for themselves and nightmares for everyone else. Trump is way too hard for their comfort, while Ben Carson's nihilism is soft in the head. Then along comes Jeb to pen a "just right" op-ed. He is that dangerous middle bear of the neoliberal brand. He sounds so darned reasonable the way he prescribes his mayhem.

Of course, regulations are only as good as how stringently they're enforced. This is the age of the deferred prosecution agreement and the slap-on-the-wrist fine. Not one Wall Street CEO has ever been held criminally accountable for frauds so epic that they collapsed the entire global banking system. Not one G.M. executive is being prosecuted for the scores of ignition switch deaths and injuries. If the Justice Dept. now offers a similar sweetheart deal to Volkswagen instead of throwing the prosecutorial book at the individuals who deliberately literally spewed tons of lethal contaminants into the air we all breathe, I think we can then rest assured that the corruption of government is well nigh complete.

When government agencies are headed by industry insiders. even the regulations remaining on the books can become travesties. A white collar criminal defense attorney heads the SEC, Citigroup effectively runs Treasury, and a scientist with deep ties to Big Pharma has just been nominated to head the FDA.

We need a clean-up -- and Howe.

***

Margaret Sullivan, Readers Will Rule, Says the Times, So Don't Be Shy:

 At the risk of sounding like a broken record (I have asked about this several times without getting a satisfactory response), please consider giving more people with an established history of excellent comments the magical green check mark.

Also, if one of the cute$y ways to double your digital revenue is to cause the page to jump around so much that when I think I am clicking on a chosen article all I get is a grotesque ad for a luxury item I neither want nor can afford, please knock it off! It makes me too nauseous to continue consuming all the wonderful content. It's especially a downer to click on Krugman only to suddenly have David Brooks's latest book report staring you in the face. Not least because it unfairly moves him up on the Most Populuh List.

Finally, I am under no illusion that I am in any way "empowered" by answering this survey. But it definitely #Raises My Awareness. So thanks for asking -:)
__________________
(The above comment explains why I have been so remiss lately in contributing to the reader comment sections!) 

***

Alan B. Krueger, The Minimum Wage: How Much Is Too Much?:

How much is too much, you ask? How about these annual CEO salaries:

David M. Zaslav, Discovery Communications: $156 million.

Mario J. Gabelli, Gamco Investors Inc: $88.5 million.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft: $84.3 million

Larry Ellison, Oracle Corp: $67.2 million

Poor Leonard Bell of Alexion Pharmaceuticals ranks at the rock bottom of the top 100 most highly paid CEOs, at a measly $20.5 million.

Source:

http://www.aflcio.org/Corporate-Watch/Paywatch-2014/100-Highest-Paid-CEOs

What we really need is a federal Maximum Wage Law. When the average CEO makes 350 times as much as the average worker, something is rotten in America. Yet here we have pundits and plutocrats moaning that it wouldn't be fair for hamburger flippers to actually be able to afford hamburger.

Go Bernie.
__________

(Krueger's op-ed, posted early yesterday for the Sunday Review section, seems to be a ready-made centrist talking point for Hillary Clinton in this Tuesday's debate. Did I mention that Krueger just happens to be one of her economic advisers? Neither he nor the Times bothered to mention that little factoid.)

***

Gail Collins, House Chaos Crisis Inferno:

J.E.B. (John Ellis Bush) cluelessly speaks the truth as he whines that acronyms make no sense. The man himself is obfuscation personified, cravenly hiding behind a trio of initials in hopes of making us forget that he is a Bush. He is a misunderstander who complains about being misunderstood. But, just like his smarter brother George, he greatly misunderestimates the intelligence of the American voter. So don't count him out just yet. Ignorance is strength.

Ryan is another word-gamer. As the living anagram of his dead paramour, selfishness-cult author Ayn R(and), he absolutely deserves to be Speaker. For one thing, Speakers have had an uncanny historical tendency to resign in disgrace or exhaustion. For another thing, he'd no longer have the selfish Randian luxury of hiding his chicanery behind the fictional tripe and cherry-picked numbers and faked footnotes of his annual Budget of Social Darwinism. The Beltway myth of his astonishing wunderkind wonkery would crumble and fall as fast as the bridges and roads and schools that the Republicans refuse to fund.

The GOP has been a debacle for a long time. But the biggest disgraces of  all are the centrist media types who still insist on taking these enemies of the people seriously. For them, the tragedy is not the death of democracy and the corruption of politics by big money: It's that there is no chief inmate in charge of the asylum.

I so look forward to next week's Democratic debate, and the sanity of Bernie Sanders.
________________

(I normally don't comment on Collins's shooting GOP fish in a barrel pieces, but this one is important because she reminds us that the Speaker of the House need not even be an elected member of the House. They can pick anyone they want. Some early nominees include ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, Jon Stewart, and the dead Three Stooges. So let your imaginations run as wild as the wild and crazy Freedom Caucus!)

Dancing With the Stars: The TPP Tango

This just in: Quasi-contestant Joe Biden has hurt himself badly during rehearsals and might get kicked off the show even before his rumored debut this weekend. Since he was so instrumental in behind the scenes arm-twisting his former Congressional colleagues into granting Boss Obama fast track authority to negotiate the biggest corporate coup the world has ever known, there is no way he can turn such a giant pratfall into a graceful waltz to the White House.

No matter that Bernie Sanders has been practicing and perfecting his own moves against the Trans-Pacific Partnership for years now. Hillary Clinton will refuse to dance the volatile head-snapping TPP Tango with him at next Tuesday's Democratic preliminaries. Instead, she'll perform her own solo version of the bait-and-switch Quick Step Flip Flop in hopes of making Bernie look like a wallflower before a viewing audience of millions.

To much orchestrated fanfare, Hillary has now "come out" against the TPP in much the same way that she "came out" for marriage equality. She lifted her calculating moistened finger to the wind and detected the prevailing direction. It read Due Left.

Practiced mover and shaker that she is, Hillary gave herself plenty of wiggle room in her preview number with PBS's Judy Woodruff. (Parenthetical parsings and asides are my own)

JUDY WOODRUFF: So let’s start with the big announcement from President Obama this week about a trade deal.

HILLARY CLINTON: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Trans-Pacific Partnership. The U.S. and 11 other countries covering 40 percent of the global economy, 800 million consumers. It’s already started a big battle between people who love free trade and people who care more about protectionism. Where do you come down?

HILLARY CLINTON: I think that there are still a lot of unanswered questions, but for me, it really comes down to those three points that I made, and the fact that we’ve learned a lot about trade agreements in the past years. Sometimes they look great on paper. I know when President Obama came into office, he inherited a trade agreement with South Korea. I, along with other members of the Cabinet, pushed hard to get a better agreement. We think we made improvements.
Now looking back on it, it doesn’t have the results we thought it would have in terms of access to the market, more exports, et cetera.

(Mistakes were made. The audience and judges are asked to pay no attention to the inconvenient truth that Hillary pushed hard for the TPP during her tenure as Obama's Secretary of State, a grand total of 45 separate times, to be precise.  During a 2012 visit to Australia she called the Mystery Package that she now claims to know nothing about "the gold standard" of trade agreements. It seems in retrospect that she trusted herself without verifying herself. Just what we need in a commander in chief.)

JUDY WOODRUFF: So are you saying that as of today, (wink, nod) this is not something you could support?

HILLARY CLINTON: What I know about it, as of today, (nod, wink) I am not in favor of what I have learned about it. And there’s one other element I want to make because I think it’s important. Trade agreements don’t happen in a vacuum, and in order for us to have a competitive economy in the global marketplace, there are things we need to do here at home that help raise wages and the Republicans have blocked everything President Obama tried to do on that front.
So for the larger issues — and then what I know, and again, I don’t have the text, we don’t yet have all the details, I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.

(That was quite the crafty disingenuous two-step, other than the unfortunate gaffe of "making an element," whatever that means. What little she claims to know about it, this very minute, is that she is not in favor of what little she deliberately has chosen not to know. Then she clumsily pivots to pretending to defend Obama against the same Republicans who are very much on board with the TPP. Smoke and mirrors won't necessarily get you that coveted mirror ball trophy, Hillary!)  

JUDY WOODRUFF: So is President Obama wrong? I mean, he’s vigorously descending (sic) this. He is saying that it does protect jobs. He says that when it comes to worrying about jobs that automation and technology are more responsible than trade agreements.

HILLARY CLINTON: Look, I think the president has been extraordinarily effective in making as strong a case as could be made and I think his hard work and that of his team has certainly moved this agreement, again, based on what I read about it because I can’t read the agreement yet, quite a distance. But I do worry that we’ve got an equation here. How do we raise incomes in America?

(Woodruff obligingly turns the conversation into a paso doble bullshit fight between two plutocratic politicians. Hillary obligingly defends the "descending" Boss and pretends that she was not an integral part of the "team" which has been selling this deal from hell for years. Based on what she now reads about what she cannot read, she ignores the Woodruff question and asks an off-topic rhetorical one of her own.  How do "we" raise incomes in America? She does not know what she does not know. If that worries her, you can imagine how much it worries people who are only a paycheck or an illness away from outright destitution.)

HILLARY CLINTON: On the one hand, trade is a part of it, but it’s not the only answer, and on the other, if we don’t get more investments in education and science and research and infrastructure and clean energy the kinds of things that will create jobs here at home, then I’m afraid on net it won’t meet the high bar that I’ve set.

(This was typically sneaky. Whenever you hear a centrist politician say "on the one hand," get ready for the dance move called the Heel Turn. Hillary learned this technique from Bill, the Heel. Another way of describing it is feinting to the left while slyly moving right.

Granted, she is nowhere near as adept at the footsy subterfuge as Obama, who  perfected the Michael Jackson Moonwalk early in his tenure, with such variations as promising a public option while secretly delivering to the insurance and drug cartels. The latest version has him calling the job-destroying TPP "progressive, and good for workers." 

As Hillary pussy-foots around her own real agenda for crass electoral purposes, she is dog-whistling loud and clear to Wall Street that she will, in fact, eventually support the TPP. But first she needs enough fig leaves to cover herself. These are known as "side deals." For example, she will probably endorse the TPP if the Republicans pass a temporary highway bill to provide a few temporary jobs. She might negotiate a little extra temporary financial aid for permanently displaced workers. Plus, if she can get her wealthy donor friends to fund more social impact bonds to place their cynical bets on a few token suffering people, she'll then feel so much better about throwing most of the people under the bus. This, in essence, is the definition of the High Neoliberal Bar. Screw people economically as you embrace them socially. Preferably accomplish this twisty strain of a stretch in front of as many corporate media cameras as inhumanely possible.)

JUDY WOODRUFF: But just quickly, if this agreement is rejected, Asia experts are saying this is going to influence — it’s going to decrease the influence of the U.S. in Asia, it is going to give a boost to China, which is trying to become more dominant, and doesn’t it conflict with your pivot to Asia when you were secretary of state?

HILLARY CLINTON: I don’t think so, because the best way that we can exercise influence in Asia is to remain the world’s strongest economy here at home and that means we have to have more middle-class jobs, more people being in the middle class, more people being able to get into the middle class, and we haven’t looked at this from a competitive perspective because the Republicans have stood in the way .And so for my analysis, I think that there is a strong argument that our leadership, our strength, our influence begins with having an economy that is producing good jobs with rising incomes, and I see the connection there. 

Exercising Influence Peddlers

(A patriotic, partisan, parochial and an utterly meaningless little word salad. Say "middle class" often enough -- say, three times in one paragraph -- and you might get a few people believing that there still is such a thing as the middle class. In Clintonland, the enemy is never the oligarchy -- it's those crazy Republicans.)

To sum up all the fears, and to be fair,  Hillary does deserve a very tiny amount of credit for throwing a flimsy toy plastic monkey wrench into the corporate takeover of the world. But her backers know that it's all part of the electoral game. They can afford to bide their greedy time as they continue to rake in record profits and amass most of the world's riches at the expense of everybody else.

And for the duration, Hillary will bust her moves as she prepares to bust our chops. If you just can't wait for her Democratic debate performance next week, here's a fun clip to tide you over. Thrill to Hill and Bill grinding it up at Vernon Jordan's birthday bash this summer.

Warmongers Without Limits

If General John Campbell thought he'd be raked over the coals by a Senate panel  for the weekend American military attack on Doctors Without Borders, he was in for a very pleasant surprise. What he got instead was a warm bubble bath followed by a massage.

Members of the Armed Services Committee did their due groveling diligence, politely requesting that he keep them apprised of the military's investigation into its own war crime. No big rush, they'll be happy with a rough draft by Halloween. Not one of them, Republican or Democrat, uttered the phrase "war crime," of course. The euphemisms they employed to describe the prolonged air attack, resulting in critically sick patients being incinerated to death in their own hospital beds, ranged from "tragedy" to "accident" to "incident" to "mistake."

At best, the lawmakers politely asked the general if his feelings would be hurt in the event of an independent United Nations investigation of the atrocity. At worst, they apologized to the general for having to inconvenience him with their oh-so-delicate questions. Senator Tom Cotton  (R-Arkansas) even went so far as to reassure Campbell: "Do you think there's anybody here who regrets this incident more than the pilots of that airplane?"  

Campbell could barely contain his sigh of relief and the sanctimonious smirk on his face at that little doozy.  He confidently informed lawmakers that he was "not yet at liberty" to expose the truth of what really went down on Saturday. It would not be appropriate to comment while he and his troops are still getting their stories straight. He's already had to change his own story four times in four days. First, he said he didn't know much of anything about the attack. Then he wasn't sure who bombed the hospital and if the pilots knew about the hospital. Then the hospital was attacked because American soldiers were in harm's way. Then he said that Afghan troops had simply snapped their fingers, and the Americans complied by killing doctors and sick people, no questions asked. As others have noted, the official story changes and excuses have all been perfectly mirrored by the sycophantic media, including the New York Times and CNN.

The outlandish stories  seem not to matter, neither to Campbell nor the Senate committee. Now that he appears confident that his own job is not on the line, he is magnanimously able to take "full responsibility" for the atrocity.

How unfair would it be, sympathized Dave Sullivan (R-Alaska) if the United Nations presumed to investigate Exceptional America! After all, this international body doesn't investigate every Taliban atrocity, so why should they be allowed to investigate a beneficent American mistake? Did Campbell personally know of any such precedent?

"No Sir," Campbell obligingly replied.

To the extent that Campbell was grilled at all, it was over recent revelations of American military complicity with an epidemic of child sex abuse by Afghan security troops. When Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) pressed him about the scandal, he lamely responded that rampant pederasty hasn't been a problem on his own watch. He claimed he knows nothing about reports that American soldiers reporting the abuse up the chain of command have themselves been punished for being whistle-blowers. That was so 2010, or maybe 2011, he huffed.

But he vowed that if he ever does  find out that child sex abuse and cover-ups are still continuing, he'll take it all the way up to the President. Gillibrand foolishly assumed that he meant President Obama, until Campbell quickly disabused her of that notion. When Campbell says "the president" he means his colleague President Ghani, the current Afghan puppet. Ghani will also be "investigating" the hospital bombing while continuing to give the American military full immunity from prosecution for it and all other war crimes, now and in the future. That friendly "status of forces agreement" he signed with the Obama administration was a condition of his elevation to official puppethood, after all.

Republican senators did their utmost to pressure Campbell into openly criticizing President Obama's current plan to start removing half the current troops by next year.The general was too smart to take that obvious partisan bait, but the text of his opening statement was already perfectly clear. He wants it to be a true Forever War.

"Based on conditions on the ground, I do believe we have to provide our senior leadership with options different from the current plan. As I take a look at conditions on the ground, when the president made that decision it did not take into account the changes over the past two years," he declared.

He did not add, nor was he asked, about one current condition on the ground being a burnt-out hospital which might elicit just the blowback situation that the War Machine needs to justify its own perpetual presence in the Graveyard of Empires.

Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who sometimes poses as a conscientious objector, rhetorically asked Campbell about this perpetual presence. A rough synopsis of the exchange, from my own notes:

Manchin: Should we stay? Why repeat the failure in Iraq?

Campbell: Afghanistan is not Iraq. The Afghans want us there!

Manchin: Do we continue pouring money in? Isn't our presence their entire economy? Is there even an Afghanistan economy?

Campbell: We had a recent meeting in Dubai. Investors are interested in coming in and purchasing all the airfields we're closing!

Manchin: What do you say about the C-130 that just crashed on take-off? (killing one of  Manchin's constituents.)

Campbell: Thoughts and Prayers.

Perhaps the most Kafkaesque moment of his Senate testimony came toward the end of the session, as Campbell congratulated himself for the alleged improved living conditions of Afghan citizens, thanks to the American military occupation. And then he bemoaned their mass exodus from the country because of horrific conditions on the ground engendered by the 14-year-old occupation. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the American military to stay in order to prevent even more potential refugees from fleeing all the horror.

The Senate has no immediate plans to hold a hearing for the victims or witnesses to the American air attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz.

"Collateral Damage" (photo, Doctors Without Borders)

Some Victims Are More Equal Than Others

A Tale of Two Presidential Condolences.

In the coming days, we’ll learn about the victims -- young men and women who were studying and learning and working hard, their eyes set on the future, their dreams on what they could make of their lives.  And America will wrap everyone who’s grieving with our prayers and our love. But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough.  It’s not enough.  It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel.  And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America -- next week, or a couple of months from now.  -- Barack Obama, on the mass shooting that killed nine people in Oregon.

The Department of Defense has launched a full investigation, and we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy. ...Michelle and I offer our thoughts and prayers to all of the civilians affected by this incident, their families, and loved ones. We will continue to work closely with President Ghani, the Afghan government, and our international partners to support the Afghan National Defense and Security forces as they work to secure their country." -- Barack Obama, on the American bombing of a hospital that has killed at least 23 people in Afghanistan.

One condolence is eloquently maudlin and extended, the other is every bit as brief and clinical and detached as the series of "surgical strikes" that literally ripped apart an operating room, and incinerated critically ill people trapped in their beds.

If Obama is even dimly aware of his own cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, he is doing his utmost to hide it. But as ever, when a mass shooting occurs on his turf, the sycophantic press makes him the center of the story. This time, as the New York Times mawkishly commiserated, he was "as visibly angry and frustrated as he has ever appeared in public during a brief televised statement from the White House."

And as George Orwell similarly commiserated in Animal Farm:

 “I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

 I suppose that the people killed and injured in the Doctors Without Borders hospital made the wrong decision to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the deservedly despised Jeb Bush said about the Oregon shootings: "Stuff happens."

It must be hard out there for a Commander in Chief being expected to ask that Congress enact gun control laws, when he is simultaneously demanding that they allocate billions of dollars for guns, bombs and Predator Drones for his global adventures!  How hard it must be for him to castigate others for offering bland thoughts and prayers when he himself offers nothing but bland thoughts and prayers.

It seems that the only lives that count are American lives. Only American murder victims are looked upon as human beings who have been denied the chance to hope, dream, grow up, or grow old. When foreign people are killed, they are coldly downgraded to "the civilians affected by this incident." 

It could have been worse. Obama has at least bestowed upon them a bare minimum of humanity. His generals are still sticking to their own sanguine Collateral Damage depersonalization: Stuff happened.

Obama has long had a built-in auto-response to both types of murders. Domestic shooters are troubled young men who get hold of guns despite their mental health issues. Military shooters are patriots who often get accepted into the armed forces despite their mental health issues. And if they didn't have any mental health issues before they joined up, their chances of developing them skyrocket once the government issues them lethal weaponry and orders them to use it.

 A year before the Sandy Hook massacre that had Obama weeping on TV, an American soldier named Bobby Bales went on a shooting rampage in Afghanistan, young children among his 16 victims. Obama's response was boilerplate-similar to his reaction to the hospital bombing: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan."

 Many of the young male perpetrators of mass mayhem, both military and domestic, can't even remember a day when this country has not been at war. Obama himself has grotesquely dubbed them the "9/11 Generation."

He said last year,

America endures in the courage of the men and women who serve under our flag. Over more than a decade of war, this 9/11 Generation has answered our country’s call, and three months from now, our combat mission in Afghanistan will come to an end. Today, we honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice these 13 years, more than 6,800 American patriots.  And we give thanks to those who serve in harm’s way to keep our country safe and meet the threats of our time.

I guess an American bomber killing children in a hospital yesterday was not part of any combat mission, seeing as how Obama announced that the war would be over by the end of 2014.

Safely Enduring

 
When a mass shooting occurs in America, Obama calls it carnage. When a mass shooting or bombing at the hands of Americans occurs elsewhere in the world, Obama calls it "an incident." Or, if the circumstances are especially egregious, as the attack on Doctors Without Borders surely was, he magnanimously upgrades it to a Tragedy. 

If Barack Obama worked as strenuously to arm-twist and bribe and threaten members of Congress over gun control as he arm-twisted, bribed and threatened them into giving him fast-track authority to negotiate the corporate coups known as free trade deals, then the domestic weapons reform he purports to crave might have a smidgen of a chance.

The truth is that Obama didn't make a peep about gun control until after the Sandy Hook shootings. And even those noises were tepid and belated. Instead of immediately sending a bill to Congress, he named a blue ribbon panel to leisurely discuss and debate gun violence. By the time lawmakers got around to voting on an actual bill, the NRA had attacked with its own threats and bribes, and the national grief and shock and outrage had been safely diluted.

The time to act is in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity.

But on the December 2012 day of the Sandy Hook shootings that killed 27 people, mostly children,  Press Secretary Jay Carney stopped the impetus right in its tracks. "This is not the day," he sanctimoniously told the nation, "to discuss gun laws."

And it's never a good day for them to discuss stopping their wars. International carnage is the only thing still inflating their puffed-up economy. Domestic carnage by way of more than 200 mass shootings this year alone is only a symptom of the larger American disease.

The real epidemic is suicide. One hundred Americans kill themselves every single day. But universal mental health care is not in our future, because the wealthy don't want to pay the taxes necessary to fund such preventive programs.

Economist John Komlos writes:

 This must be the moment to come to our senses and set entirely new priorities for our society in vigorously confronting the mass murder epidemic head on. We will never be able to lead decent lives unless we are capable of reigning in the terror at home, because we will continue to live with constant anxiety.

Instead of vacuous slogans of growing the economy and ineffective lamentations about the vicious murders, which will do absolutely nothing to lower the murder rate, we should set ourselves the explicit goal of reducing mass murders in the same way President John F. Kennedy declared the goal of reaching the moon within a decade. Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook Elementary School disaster if they’d agree with such a national mobilization at any price. We cannot do that on borrowed money. The only way to accomplish such a goal is by paying for it through additional taxes and a reduction in the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. There is no getting around that.

Wealth inequality and the replacement of democracy with an oligarchy is hazardous to our health. The super-rich are a clear and present danger to all of us. 

 The lives of American citizens, Afghan citizens, all citizens, depend upon stopping the pathological rich. Eighty multi-billionaires now own half the wealth of the entire planet.

We can't afford them. It's time for a global wealth tax. It's the only way to cure them and their political operatives of their violent addiction to money and power and death.

Bless Me, Father

By Jay - Ottawa

The following chapter is from a story (fiction) with 9/11 as its backdrop.  A group of priests from the New York City diocese is holding its monthly breakfast meeting at "Ribbons," a fancy restaurant located on the top two floors of the North Tower.

  

BLESS ME, FATHER

A few dozen priests from the archdiocese had reserved a windowless private dining room on the lower level for a prayer breakfast.  They were the canon lawyers of the diocese who had assembled to learn more about the sins of liberation theology.  By now the Eggs Benedict had been disappeared, the whiskey sours drained away, and the speaker’s talk run out of words.  The priests in their dark suits and Roman collars pushed back their chairs to stand mess hall style on both sides of the long linen-covered table.  With heads bowed, they waited for the most senior among them to trigger the recitation of ‘Grace after Meals.’

That would have been Monsignor Reilly:  “We give Thee thanks––”

Everybody chimed in “––for all Thy benefits, O Lord, and may the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace, amen.”

That was the moment the plane struck.  Smoke began to filter into their little dining room.  They waited for a waiter to return to show them the way to safety, but no one came.  The men of God were on their own.  As the smoke thickened, quick thinkers got busy placing wet tablecloths over vents and at the base of doors.  Smoke filtered in less rapidly, and that was good.

“Down on the floor; the air is better,” said one, and these mostly middle-aged and out-of-shape men went down clumsily on their knees and then down on their bellies.  The smoke grew thicker and more poisonous.  Mother of God, it stings!  The floor became uncomfortably warm.  Lord in heaven, this heat!  A few priests pushed themselves back up on their knees but found the smoke worse than the heat.  God help us!  Dry hacking coughs multiplied and grew louder.  O Christ!  The coughing and choking reached a crescendo.  This was the end and they knew it.  As if it were written in the program they began to pair off for last confessions.  Jesu!  The smoke did not hold back until everyone had finished with his last confession.  Several penitents lost consciousness before they came to the end of their declarations.  The loud coughing began to taper off as, one by one, priests lay their heads down on the carpet and quietly expired.

As luck would have it, Monsignor Reilly’s most likely confessor, who had sat at his right hand through the breakfast, happened to be the oldest man in the room.  Father Eusebius Weber’s tired heart gave out before Reilly even finished reciting the sacrament’s opening formula.  Reilly, alas, was very much not in the state of grace.  He had to get clean of something before he stumbled into eternity.  A great fear took hold of him; adrenalin flooded his veins and kept him going.  He began to crawl around on his elbows looking for another priest who was still conscious.  “Hey, Hey! … C’mon!”  He poked one still form after another without success and kept moving.  How many seconds were left to him before he was in eternity looking at the whole of it forever?  And with his record, still unconfessed and unforgiven.

Providentially, he bumped into Father DiSimone.  Anthony DeSimone was the captain of the diocesan golf team and a natural athlete.  That summer, through a careful selection of opponents in the rich suburbs, the diocesan team had won thousands of dollars for the chancery, which was the bishop’s headquarters where Reilly served as chancellor.  DiSimone was now holding a wet napkin over his nose and mouth, but Reilly recognized those eyes, such remarkable pale blue eyes, from the time Reilly had been director of the diocesan seminary and DiSimone a young seminarian.

“Tony, good lad, thank God you’re here,” Reilly rasped in a high-pitched chipmunk voice.  “Quick, hear my confession.”  He put his face down to cough into the carpet only to suck in more smoke.

Father DiSimone’s pale blue eyes looked back over the napkin.  He lowered the napkin when Monsignor Reilly raised his head.  “I can imagine what you want to confess, Monsignor.  I was one of your toy boys at the seminary, remember?  Every day now I wipe the muck off my soul.”

Reilly’s throat burned, his lungs begged for oxygen.  “For the love of Christ, Tony, forgive!”  DiSimone stared back with the flat affect of an athlete, loose and relaxed before the next play.  Reilly, on the other hand, grew more frantic.  “Absolution, Tony, please.  Sign of the cross.  Just say the words.”

 Father DiSimone took a breath to say something but was interrupted by his own fit of coughing.  When it stopped he looked back at the monsignor to whisper in a hoarse but unhurried voice, “Fuck you, Reilly.  And I’m sure I speak for others."

Bernie Rising

One of the media and Democratic establishments' favorite reasons for why Bernie Sanders cannot possibly win the party's nomination is because he lacks African-American support. 

Ever since there has been a Clintonland, there has been the ironclad conventional wisdom that Black voters just l-o-o-o-ve Bill and Hill. It was only the emergence of Barack Obama that temporarily redirected the love away from them.

That this has largely been a myth of their own making is evidenced by a brand new poll showing Hillary's support among Black voters in a virtual free-fall, while Bernie's numbers are soaring. They are rising far more precipitously than the Establishment could ever have dreamed, predicted -- or, to be honest, dreaded:

Suffolk/USA Today Poll

Bernie's favorability rating among black Democrats is 31 points up, while Hillary's numbers are 31 points down. This is triple the increase in her negatives among white Democrats. Bernie's drastically improved numbers also mesh nicely with the fact that a lot more voters know about him now than they did three months ago. (thanks in large part to the obvious corporate news blackout of his campaign.)

As Philip Bump of the Washington Post notes, this is only one poll and the numbers might also be reflective of that netherworld where voters are still trying to make up their minds. But this poll has got to be making the Clintonites nervous and Sanders supporters elated.

And now that Sanders' fundraising has outpaced even that of Obama's 2008 race during the same pre-primary quarter, the mighty New York Times has been forced to begin taking him seriously. Because money talks, even if the corporate media still religiously avoid talking about his actual platform and policy ideas in anything close to a detailed, positive and respectful manner.

Their backtracking/feigned innocence is pretty hilarious. For example, the Times' Patrick Healy disingenuously wrote yesterday: 

Mr. Sanders was initially dismissed by political insiders as a fringe candidate running only to push Hillary Rodham Clinton to the left. But he has now demonstrated that he has the resources and the supporters, whom he has only begun to tap financially, to compete for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Notice the self-serving passive voice. Notice the lack of the Times' ownership of its own complicity in the orchestrated denigration of Bernie Sanders. That they are now according him a modicum of respect based solely on the money he has in the bank is a testament to their own corruption and shallowness.

And the hit jobs will still keep coming, of course. The most egregious piece has got to be the one this week by the Washington Post's David Farenthold, who claims that not only would a President Sanders be a runaway big spender: He would be an authoritarian control freak aiming to shove universal health care and free college tuition down our throats. Did I mention that Farenthold is employed as a putative reporter, not as a columnist? (I wrote about this right-wing slimeball hack a year ago, after his hit job on Job Corps led to the closure of one of its training sites by the Obama Labor Department.)


Maybe we won't even need to repeal Citizens United if Bernie Sanders is elected president. Maybe Money-Speech will just crawl into a dusty corner somewhere and die of its own loathsome, misbegotten accord. Maybe the plutocrats will realize that their cash can't buy everything and everybody after all.

The Pope and the Predators

My Pope balloon had already begun to deflate days before the news burst that Pope Francis (or his Vatican minions, or his Vatican enemies) sneaked homophobia poster girl Kim Davis across a phalanx of armed militia guarding his Washington embassy digs for a private, top-secret embrace with him.

At first it looked as though the story of the Pope's meeting with the Kentucky clerk who went to jail rather than issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples was either made up out of holy cloth, or wildly exaggerated by her own handlers. But then the Vatican grudgingly admitted that not only had a private meeting indeed taken place, but that the Pope himself had reached out to Kim Davis. And that everybody was sworn to secrecy until Francis was safely back home in Rome.

Holy Hypocrisy!

But what had really precipitated my own descent from the national Papal High was his meeting on Thursday with Stephen Schwarzman in a Harlem parochial school. This multibillionaire vulture capitalist -- whose own personal dogma is More Money, More Power, More-ality -- had awarded millions of dollars (chump change for him) in scholarships to students, and thus bought himself a post-modern plenary indulgence in the form of a greedwashing photo-op of himself being personally blessed by the People's Pope.

If Kim Davis is the poster girl for homophobes, Shwarzman is the poster boy for plutocratic supremacists. He's as much a self-dealing martyr as she is, whining regularly that billionaires like him are the real victims of the class war. He is infamous for having once compared tycoons too-mildly taxed by the government to Jews persecuted by the Nazis.

" Back in 2010," wrote Paul Krugman last year in a column called Paranoia of the Plutocrats, "Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, declared that proposals to eliminate tax loopholes for hedge fund and private-equity managers were 'like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939'".

And from a profile of Schwarzman in New York magazine:

Steve Schwarzman is a perfect poster boy for this age of greed, sharklike, perpetually grinning, a tiny Gordon Gekko without the hair product. In Palm Beach (where he bought a historic landmark house for $20.5 million and tore it down), he eats his three-course lunches (including $400 stone crabs) in less than fifteen minutes and complains about the squeaky rubber soles of a servant’s shoes. Once, in the presence of a Times reporter, he buzzed a man to bring coffee, then stalked off to dress down the servant—“I called you six times.”

The Pope and the Plute (Instagram Photo by #scentfully sue)

  As if pandering to and blessing a financial predator was not enough of a slap in the face of decency, Pope Francis then proceeded to inform the students that the biggest threat to their happiness is not the wealth inequality engendered by robber barons like Schwarzman -- but an invisible demon.

Mephistopheles Flying over Wittenberg (Delacroix)

From the translated transcript of his talk to the assembled poor students, parents, politicians, potentates and plutocrats:

 “Who is the one who sows sadness, who sows distrust, who sows envy, who sows evil desires? What is his name? The devil, the devil! The devil always sows sadness because he doesn't want us happy, he doesn't want us to dream."

Holy Hell!  It brings a whole new meaning to Feeling the Bern. Schwarzman must feel so happy to have been absolved, his guilt deflected to a make-believe boogeyman.

From my feeling of euphoria that this new Pope was someone refreshing and different, it was a jolting downer of a deja vu trip back to my days in Catholic school when Sister Mary Mean would regularly warn us that chewing the communion wafer instead of gagging it down whole was a mortal sin punishable by eternal damnation and third degree burns. Listening to the Pope's spiel at Our Lady Queen of Angels suddenly revived memories of all the hellish episodes that had caused me to become a born-again Lapsed Catholic in the first place.

So regardless of whether the Pope's meeting with Kim Davis turns out to have been a vast right wing media conspiracy, or a set-up job by conservative clerics designed to deliberately harsh his mellow among liberals, I am still sticking with secular humanism. Pope Francis knew full well that the well-dressed oligarchs sitting in the front rows at all his gigs were not ordinary folk.

I've since learned that besides rightly calling capitalism "the dung of the devil," Pope Francis is a die-hard believer in Satan as an actual, living being capable of physically possessing actual, living beings. (Right up there with the belief of the majority of the American people, I might add.) Even some Catholic scholars think that he goes a bit too far with the hell fetish, as he blames everything from the Mexican drug wars to the Middle East conflagrations on Old Nick instead of on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and the military-industrial complex. His ascension to the throne of Saint Peter has also sparked a steep rise during the past few years in the number of people seeking exorcisms.

The next thing you know, we'll hear that he had a secret meeting with Linda Blair while he was in town.

Meanwhile, the  establishment has seized upon the Pope's meeting with Kim Davis as the latest political chapter in the Culture Wars saga. New York Times editorialist Francis X. Clines writes,

 In his address to Congress, the pope was diplomatic in alluding to the church’s firm and well known opposition to same-sex marriage, maintaining, “fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.” But in his decision to seek out Ms. Davis, Pope Francis seemed to suggest the Vatican was willing to get more involved in the politics of the issue. The papal invitation will hardly diminish Ms. Davis’s standing as a national celebrity and rallying figure for those opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, including some Republican candidates for president who sought to share her spotlight. While in Washington, she confirmed that she had left the Democratic party and become a Republican. Her attorney said they eagerly awaited a photographic record of the papal meeting from the Vatican.

My published response:

 Not only did the Pope meet with Kim Davis, the Vatican decreed that the visit be kept secret until he was safely gone. The cover-up is just as bad as the meeting itself. It makes the Pope look like just another self-interested politician with a hidden agenda. It makes the Church look like just another corporation more concerned about forging a new public image than in rooting out its own greed and corruption and entrenched hypocrisy.

My Pope balloon had already begun to deflate when Francis visited a Harlem school and warned little children about "the devil" instead of warning them about the vulture capitalists and politicians standing right next to them in the room. Too many rich and influential people were able to buy themselves their own P.R. camera time and co-opt the same poor people they regularly ignore or blame in their capacity as power brokers. The Pope should have chased those money changers right out of that school and performed an exorcism of the real-life demon of Wall Street while he was in town. Instead, he sold medieval superstition to little kids. It was cringe-worthy, and anti-Enlightenment.

That being said, I do champion Kim Davis's right to stay strong and believe in whatever she wants. But instead of complaining and making a martyr out of herself, she should resign her public post and find a job where she doesn't have to be in contact with the good people she seems to find so distasteful. A cloister and a vow of silence might be just the ticket.

Thanks to the Pope, the miscreants of politics and finance and war can exorcise themselves of those tired old minima culpas known as "mistakes were made" and "nobody could ever have predicted."  

Now they can just shrug their shoulders, claim that the Devil made them do it, and condemn the rest of us to a living hell while they bribe and stampede their own way into Paradise.

Blessed Steve Schwarzman's $42 million estate (Mephistopheles-eye view)