Commentariat Central: Exploding Heads Edition

As per reader request, here's another in my semi-regular series of New York Times comment dumps (my published responses follow synopses/quotes from each op-ed).

Charles Blow, Donald Trump, Grand Wizard of Birtherism, 9/17>

Charles easily surpasses the smarmy born-again indignados of the corporate media's anti-Trump brigade of Profiles in Courage who've become brave in great numbers only because there is great protection in crowds.

This man is so low that he’s subterranean.

Donald Trump said Friday: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.”

That was a lie. There is no evidence Hillary Clinton and her campaign either started or took part in the efforts to question the location of Barack Obama’s birth.

He continued: “I finished it.”

My published response:

 Yes, Trump's birther campaign was and is based upon a lie. But to say that nobody in Clinton World ever took part in any efforts to question the president's birthplace is also less than truthful.

An editor of McClatchy Newspapers, a well-respected mainstream service, reports that one "rogue" Clinton volunteer was fired in the 2008 for spreading the rumor. The machinations of Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal are even more problematic, since he allegedly suggested to the McClatchy editor that Obama had been born in Kenya. The newspaper duly investigated and found the allegation to be false. More here:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article1023...

The Obama administration was so well-aware of Blumenthal's methods that they banned him from the White House and State Dept. job after the 2008 election:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/politics/16emanuel.html?pagewanted=all

The Blumenthal connection is obviously the basis for Trump's mendacious claim that Hillary Clinton "started" the birther movement. Trump took a short-lived whispering campaign and turned it into a full-fledged crusade. He co-opted racism and the Tea Party movement as subsidiaries of his corporate media empire brand. It made him even more fabulously rich and famous than he ever could have gotten by being just another run-of-the mill grifter.

And the media conglomerate of which he is an integral part is only too happy to help and to profit right along with him.

I might have guessed that this fairly bland reality check for the Clinton-supporting Charles Blow would elicit the usual responses from the usual suspects, including the accusation that I am doing the nasty work of the "alt-right" as well as ignoring the fact that I'd credited McClatchy both for doing its journalistic duty of accurately writing history and for debunking Trump.

So I wrote this generic follow-up comment addressed to no one troll in particular: 

 Based upon the comments to my comment thus far, it is painfully apparent that any fact-based criticism of Clinton is undesirable and must be avoided at all costs lest righteous heads explode. Last time I checked, neither McClatchy nor the Times are "alt-right" outfits. Just because right-wing sites pick up and run with certain facts about Clinton doesn't mean these facts should be delegitimized on their face. Nothing I wrote is a distortion of the truth.

Believe it or not, it is possible, even desirable, to both expose and deride Trump and to examine and critique Clinton. Nuance, unfortunately, is one of the casualties of this crazy-time election. Pick a side, close your eyes and ears, and stay blissfully ignorant.

I posted links as a courtesy because we are only allowed 1500 characters in comments. If you don't choose to click them, that's your prerogative.

This in turn elicited another response which took issue with my rhetoric, by mansplaining:

 Karen Garcia -- "it is painfully apparent that any fact-based criticism of Clinton is undesirable and must be avoided at all costs lest righteous heads explode"

Yes, and that is counter-productive. It is really just Trump's method. It undermines an attack on Trump's method.

My counter-response:

 Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your comment, but you seem to imply that colorful metaphors and sarcasm from the Left should be off the table because Trump himself is often sarcastic. Wow.

By the way, "Exploding Head Syndrome" (EHS) is a bona fide medical condition. According to neurologist John Pearce, symptoms include “a sense of explosion in the head, confined to the hours of sleep, which is harmless but very frightening for the sufferer.... Some people also see flashes of light, feel hot, experience chest pains and palpitations, or feel an electrical sensation rising from the lower torso to the head."

Of course, their heads are not actually exploding.

I'd hazard a guess that this syndrome is probably becoming even more prevalent during our fraught election season, given the nightmare that is Donald Trump.

***

Paul Krugman, A Lie Too Far? (blogpost), 9/17:

Krugman is right pleased that the press is following his profiles-in-courage advice and finally calling Trump a big fat loathsome liar in lying about both birtherism and Hillary's nonexistent direct role in its inception:

The Matt Lauer debacle may have helped bring things into focus. And tightening polls probably matter too, not because journalists are being partisan, but because they are now faced with the enormity of what their fact-free jeering of HRC and fawning over DJT might produce.

There are now two questions: will this last, and if it does, has the turn come soon enough? In both cases, nobody knows. But just imagine how different this election would look if we’d had this kind of simple, factual, truly balanced (as opposed to both-sides-do-it) reporting all along.

My response (comparatively well-received by the readership because it contained no tastelessly explosive Clinton criticism):

 I may be wrong, but I suspect that the newfound journalism in the public interest being displayed by the corporate media is a one-off. Some of them seem to be more miffed about being "played" by Trump in the big lead-up to the big non-apology than they are willing to admit that they themselves are complicit supporting players on the big stage of dirty politics.

Furthermore, they are calling Trump a liar based upon a libel committed against President Obama, not for his libel of and his continuing attacks on Hillary Clinton. Unless they now start reporting in the vein of "Trump falsely claimed that Mrs. Clinton robbed a bank...." rather than the usual "Trump asserted that Mrs. Clinton robbed a bank," then I am taking their born-again ethics with a huge grain of salt.

Let's hope that now that they've finally uttered the "lie" word and their careerist worlds didn't come crashing down on top of them, they'll develop more of a taste for it - much as they did when they finally admitted that enhanced interrogation is actually torture.

***

David Brooks, The Uses of Patriotism, 9/16

I've largely abandoned my old hobby of messing with boring old Brooks, but this one was particularly loathsome, not to mention borderline racist. It seems that those young black folk are not giving the American Flag the proper religious reverence:

Recently, the civic religion has been under assault. Many schools no longer teach American history, so students never learn the facts and tenets of their creed. A globalist mentality teaches students they are citizens of the world rather than citizens of America.

Critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates have arisen, arguing that the American reality is so far from the American creed as to negate the value of the whole thing. The multiculturalist mind-set values racial, gender and ethnic identities and regards national identities as reactionary and exclusive.

He gives no evidence that American history is no longer being taught in "many schools." More likely, he's miffed that history isn't taught as a religion the way that science is sometimes taught as creationist "intelligent" design. My published response:

 Other commenters have aptly pointed out the racist roots of our national anthem. The Founding Fathers stood up for their own freedom, to own other human beings and to expand their territory without regard for the rights of aboriginal populations. Why should Black athletes, or any one else for that matter, stand up to celebrate such an ignominious history?

There are plenty of other ways to display patriotism than singing a song or reciting a pledge. Protest is as all-American as democracy itself. We need a lot more of it.

If David Brooks is scared that "critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates have arisen" to democratically and patriotically criticize the country we live in, that actually gives me hope. The protests and rhetoric of the left are becoming strong enough to drown out and vanquish both neoliberalism and Trumpism.

 Brooks's real squeamishness seems to be that the rising solidarity among people of different backgrounds and ethnicities against economic, social and racial oppression is not of the bland, submissive kind of which the oligarchs running this place would approve.

People are refusing to be co-opted by the stentorian sermons and anti-democratic platitudes that "critics like Brooks" keep dishing out like rancid stew.

He's been preaching Spencerian "every man for himself" drivel since forever, and now he wants to impose solidarity from on high? Give me a break.

***

Paul Krugman, Obama's Trickle-Up Economics, 9/16:

More Obama legacy-burnishing and Clinton-boosting and statistical cherry-picking. The big tell is that Krugman's link to "Census Bureau report" goes not to the report itself, but to a New York Times "Upshot" interpretation of it. Krugman pontificates:

What happened instead after Mr. Obama was re-elected was the best job growth since the 1990s. But family incomes, at least as estimated by the Census, continued to lag. So there was still some statistical basis for the right’s Obama-bashing. Now that statistical basis is gone.

You might ask whether these numbers reflect reality. It’s often claimed that Americans aren’t feeling any economic recovery — and if anyone were to ask Mr. Trump, he would no doubt claim that the Census numbers, like every number he doesn’t like, are cooked.

But be wary of polling on this issue. When Americans are asked how the economy is doing, many of them just repeat what they think they heard on Fox News: By large margins, Republicans say that unemployment is up and the stock market is down under Mr. Obama, the opposite of the truth. On the other hand, when you ask people how well they personally are doing, the Obama years have been marked by large improvements — a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who see themselves as thriving.

My published response (trigger warning: sarcasm ahead!)

 Happy days are here again. So if you insist on feeling blue as you peer into your empty wallet, you've probably been watching too much Fox News.

Yes, median incomes are up and poverty is down. But look closely at the Census figures and you see that although people might be working longer hours, they certainly haven't gotten a raise. Most of the new jobs created have been of the low-wage, service sector variety.

According to the report, the median pay of single women without children jumped 8.7%. This sounds fantastic until you realize that their actual median salary increased to $29,022 from $26,022 in 2014. That's nowhere close to a living wage, especially if most of it has to go toward skyrocketing rent. So if you don't think you've come a long way, baby, by getting 5-10 more hours at Walmart thanks to the beneficence of the clan that owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, then you've probably been watching too much Fox News.

Under "Total Income Dispersion", the report shows that the poorest, lowest quintile received only 3.1% of total income, while the top 20% raked in more than half of it. The top 5% grabbed more than a fifth of the entire pie. Income inequality is not improving, not at all.

Another report out this week found that only 16% of the jobs available to new college grads give them enough purchasing power to buy a home and start a family.

So turn off Fox, all you pessimists, and raise a glass to Dr. Pangloss.

Proud To Be a Moral Anti-Deplorable

 I finally figured out why I've been so bothered by Hillary Clinton's "Basket of Deplorables" speech last week. I also figured out why her cavalier lumping of non-deplorable Trump supporters into their separate category of neediness deserves its own special basket of cloying Clintonoid condescension.

What bothered me perhaps more than her words was the braying, approving reaction to them from the crowd of celebrities and plutocrats who'd paid thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to gain admission to her event. In deploring the Trumpenproletariat, Clinton also effectively absolved her wealthy liberal donors of their own latent racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, ignorance, neediness... you name it.

They were implicitly dubbed the virtuous anti-deplorable moral majority of the moneyed minority. (Say three times fast.)

Whether you despise Trump or only pretend to loathe him in order to fit in with the in-crowd, then it naturally follows that you are a good liberal. You try to keep your classism to yourself. Ditto for your colorblind racism. After all, if you voted for Barack Obama, you are absolved of racism, then and now and forever. A whole country full of deplorables might not be smart and post-racial, but you most certainly are. After all, you just gave the black maid a quarter an hour raise to help pay for her hour-long subway or bus ride to your Manhattan high-rise.

 You're all for immigration reform, too. As Obama himself said in a recent anti-Trump address to his upper middle class base, we must always welcome new "talent" to our shores, regardless of their ethnicity.

 Because it’s our diversity, our welcoming of all talent, our treating of everybody fairly—no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, or faith—that’s part of what makes our country great. It’s what makes us resilient. And if we stay true to those values, we’ll uphold the legacy of those we’ve lost, and keep our nation strong and free. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

 As long as refugees have a skill-set, they can come right on in. Tired, poor and huddled no longer cuts it. But hey, this is the "real world" we're living in. Medical benefits and social services only go so far when funds are limited. They're deliberately and artificially limited by spending an estimated $5 trillion on wars of aggression in the last 15 years. And who needs a stupid Trump wall when Homeland Security and ICE have already deported more people under Obama than they did under any previous administration? Why wear your xenophobia on your sleeve when you can imprison hundreds of Central American refugee mothers and children in substandard privatized prisons before you send them back to certain death in their CIA-destabilized home countries?

If you are a moral anti-deplorable who hates Trump's hateful rhetoric and loves Hillary's identity politics, there is no need to worry your expensively coiffed heads over the institutional racism being conducted in your names every single day of every single year, both here and abroad.

Since you elected and you love Barack Obama, you can scoff with utter impunity at the Black Lives Matter movement. After all, Obama himself has regularly lectured young black activists with his own brand of "respectability politics" and chided them for their rudeness to powerful politicians at rallies and fund-raisers.

If you are a proud anti-deplorable, you can ignore the global racist imperialism exported by the United States and propagandized as liberal democracy-sharing or defense of our national security. No need to worry and wonder that the millions of innocents displaced, maimed and killed by our CIA coups and our wars and our drone strikes have mostly been of the darker-skinned variety.

 No need to ask yourselves why American Muslims have been burdened with a special duty to "disown" terrorism, while white Christians are given immunity from responsibility for homegrown terror attacks.

After all, you don't wear any incipient Trumpism you might possess right on your sleeve. That would be illiberal.

  Hillary's grating mixture of disdain and condescension was rendered all the more hypocritical by where it occurred: the Cipriani Club, Wall Street, USA.

It was from the balcony of that bastion of plutocratic excess that young Champagne-sipping financiers yelled their epithets down to the Zuccotti Park Occupy campers in 2011, as raucously as they yelled their contempt at the Trumpenproletariat five years later. They see no difference between bottom-up, left wing democratic socialism and elite co-opted right wing populism. Both types threaten their bottom lines.

As I wrote way back when,

The Cipriani Club, for those of you not in the know (and I was among the unknowing myself until earlier today) was constructed during the Gilded Age of  Wall Street's glorious heyday  and comprises an entire city block. (the better to view the hoi polloi).  It now houses restaurants, condos selling in the mid to high seven figures, spas, bars. The restaurant has the dubious distinction of being home to a $32 hamburger. It's gotten many a lousy review in the New York Times, for its terrible food, tiny chairs and conspicuous consumption.  As far as I know, the Cipriani is not among the financial district eateries donating food to the Zuccotti Park campers.  But we can always call and ask!  Here is their number: 212-699-4096.
And speaking of reviews: Ginia Bellafante, the Times columnist who made fun of the Wall Street protesters and their regalia last weekend, should have gone into Cipriani instead.  According to the Indagare travel site, the uber-wealthy Cipriani crowd " truly verges on Fellini-esque with extreme hairdos, face-lifts and implants on parade."  And all Bellafante could come up with was a topless dancer and some cheap masks?  What has journalism come to? 

"What has journalism come to?" is now the ironic and constant refrain of liberal pundits bemoaning a mass outbreak of unfairness and "false equivalency" regarding the allegedly disparate coverage of the ruling class racketeers named Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Paul Krugman, who contributes to the mass hysteria over Neoliberal Death Match 2016 by pronouncing his own elite self terrified by the smears and innuendoes against Clinton, apparently forgets that he himself once led the fear-mongering pack with his own smears against Bernie Sanders and his progressive supporters.

It's unfair, Krugman says without one smidgen of hard evidence, that the pristine Clinton Foundation is getting trashed while Trump's bogus charity is not: 

And I don’t see how the huffing and puffing about the foundation — which “raised questions”, but where the media were completely unwilling to accept the answers they found — fits into this at all.

No, it’s something special about Clinton Rules. I don’t really understand it. But it has the feeling of a high school clique bullying a nerdy classmate because it’s the cool thing to do.

And as I feared, it looks as if people who cried wolf about non-scandals are now engaged in an all-out effort to dig up or invent dirt to justify their previous Clinton hostility.

Hard to believe that such pettiness could have horrifying consequences. But I am very scared.

My suggestion to Petrified Paul would be that he construct a panic room in his fortified $2 million Manhattan condo if he has not already done so. Maybe such a safe space would protect him against the journalistic micro-aggressions of his own employer, and who knows, maybe even allow the irony of his own Berniebro bullying to sink into his steel-reinforced mind. That bullying had the distinct feel of a high school clique, given that Krugman enlisted the aid of a clique of neoliberal establishment economists-for-hire to make his case against single payer health care.

Here's my published comment to his latest deplorable disingenuousness:

The reason the Clintons are held to a higher standard is because they were lifetime putative public servants who then proceeded to cash in, big-time, on that public service.

Trump, never having been a public servant, is given a comparative free pass for a whole lifetime of private chicanery. He's also a fixture on the social scene in New York, the media capital of the world. He schmoozes with such media stars as Matt Lauer and Maureen Dowd and media mogul Barry Diller, who also hangs out with BFFs Chelsea and Ivanka.

So why the sudden shock that media stars and media conglomerates don't act like old-school muckrakers and hold Donald Trump's feet to the fire? A presidential candidate he may be, but he is still a private citizen of the all-American huckster type. In our culture, we tend to grudgingly admire these types for their amorality and outsize egos. Trump is lovable the way Tony Soprano was lovable. Because he gets away with stuff. If we lived in a society where criminal justice rules applied to the wealthy, he would have been moldering in prison with Bernie Madoff by now.

Read David Cay Johnston's book on how Trump came to be, and you'll see that there's plenty of blame to go around for his perfidious rise. He knows how to co-opt fellow greedsters and needy sycophants.

And speaking of the Bushies, the fact that they were never prosecuted themselves speaks even more ugly volumes about America the Exceptional.

Only the poor get punished. It's pretty deplorable.

Deplorables of the Deep State

While the nation ostensibly mourns the thousands of victims of the 9/11 attacks today, thousands of elite pathocrats and plutocrats are cackling, silently yet maniacally. September 11th is the permanent catastrophe that keeps right on giving to them. It's always Christmas for the Deep Security State, a behemoth so big and so unaccountable and so flush with cash that even the president himself cannot be aware of all its myriad moving parts. 

As reported by Dana Priest and William Arkin, 9/11 has spawned a virtual Fourth Branch of government which grows secretly and exponentially with every passing anniversary of the attacks:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

Therefore, all the president can do to try and control the permanent War on Terror is to renew America's State of Emergency for a 16th straight year, and continue issuing proclamations and uttering platitudes about the Nine Eleven Generation. These are the young people who have never known a day when their nation has not been at war.  Although the marketing campaigns are creepily similar, they are not to be confused with the Pepsi Generation. That might be way too crass.

Crass, my ass: Coke, in true capitalistic competitive spirit, marked our great national day of hegemony and death by constructing a Twin Towers replica made entirely out of soda cans. To add insult to injury, they built it in a Florida Walmart. The marketing geniuses apparently didn't realize the display was in bad taste until thousands of shoppers told them so, and the exhibit was duly removed by $8-an-hour associates with no company health insurance benefits.

Meanwhile, 9/11 continues to be very, very good for neoliberal capitalism. As Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee writes in his Diary of a Bad Year, 

The bogeyman Osama bin Laden has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Armed with nothing but Kalashnikovs and plastic explosives, he and his followers have terrorized and demoralized the West, driving nations into wholesale panic. To the bullying, authoritarian, militaristic strand in Western political life, Osama has been a gift from the gods.

No matter that U.S. special forces executed a cowering Osama in 2012 in the run-up to Barack Obama's re-election campaign. The patriotic spirit of terror lives on, with or without him.

The September 11 attacks were the pretext to invade Iraq a year and half later.  Nearly 7,000 U.S. service people and at least a quarter of a million civilians have died since the start of the war, which continues with the deployment of at least a thousand new Gen-9/11 troops to fight Isis. Obama's drones have murdered at least hundreds of innocent women and children in areas with whom this country is not even officially at war.

Bill Quigley writes:

Since 9/11 US spending on our military cost well over $3 trillion. Direct combat and reconstruction costs for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11 have officially cost US taxpayers $1.6 trillion dollars according to the Congressional Research Service.   Additional trillions have been spent on growing the Pentagon budget and for present and future increased health and disability benefits for veterans.
The US military captures 55 percent of our national discretionary spending and spending on veterans benefits is another 6 percent. Since 9/11 military spending has increased by 50 percent while spending on other discretionary domestic spending increased by 13 percent according to the National Priorities Project.

War profiteers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have raked in billions of dollars in profits in the 15 years since 9/11. Although Saudi Arabia has been at least indirectly implicated in the attacks, the United States continues to sell that repressive regime billions of dollars worth of arms for the slaughter of Yemeni civilians. President Obama is expected to veto a bill which would allow 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia for monetary damages.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton rails against the millions of Donald Trump supporters who have been carefully and incessantly taught to be Islamophobes by the leaders and corporate media of America. The "deplorables" of Flyover Country simply didn't wake up one morning and start railing against Muslims based upon any direct knowledge or experience. They simply turned on CNN and Fox and MSNBC and watched the sycophantic mass media cozily embed themselves with the American invaders. They learned to think of Muslims as bad guys whose pictures were on decks of cards. "Clash of civilizations" propaganda has been polluting our airwaves with a vengeance for going on two decades.

It seems that Clinton forgot to notice all the rotten eggs of the Military-Industrial complex in her own Basket of Deplorables. Despite an overpowering reek, they're nesting there comfortably in their abundant money grass. Not only have they never been convicted of torture and war crimes, graft and corruption, they are getting pride of place at the gourmet table. And because they're encased in solid gold, there's no danger of them ever getting devoured themselves. People are too weary to develop a taste for rebellion against the forever wars being waged in all our names.

So we turn away in apathy or disgust. And then we hold our noses, and we choose a commander in chief using the parts of our brains which process fear rather than exercising those which enable rational thought.

Infotainment in the Public Interest

Media cyberspace is all a-Twitter over actor Matt Lauer's dismal performance in NBC/Comcast-Universal's poorly scripted "Commander in Chief Forum," broadcast on Wednesday night.

The network staged the festivities in the Intrepid Air, Sea and Space Museum to see whether Matt Lauer would have enough air and space to stick it to two political sharks as intrepidly as he once stuck it to the fake predators in Sharknado 2.

MSNBC seemed to have forgotten that Lauer was quite literally eaten alive in the third episode of the Sharknado franchise. It was his recent star turn in   "grilling" bad boy Ryan Lochte during the Rio Olympics that probably made them think that he could also hold two much more powerful and seasoned storytellers to account.

Lauer challenged Lochte's story about getting robbed at gunpoint, so isn't it logical that he'd also challenge Hillary Clinton's promise not to send ground troops to Iraq and Syria by pointing out that there are already hundreds, if not thousands, of boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria? Who would have thought he'd give Donald Trump a pass over his "secret plan" to defeat Isis? And Lauer unbelievably didn't seem to know that Trump had told shock jock Howard Stern he supported the Iraq War way back when.

 Lauer delivered his scripted questions with all the annoying gravitas that he could muster. But those real sharks sure can get slippery, even when they look fake and sound fake.

Don't blame Lauer, a $28 million-a-year media personality, for not being a real journalist and for treating a presidential election like just another game. Blame his greedy bosses and Wall Street investors and advertisers for making it a spectator sport in the first place and for caring more about ratings and profits than they do about informing the public.

Broadcasting in the public interest has largely gone the way of the rotary phone. People who can still afford cable have neither the time nor the attention spans to devote to mulling over public policy. In any case, there is no longer much of "the public" in neoliberal policies decided by market-based technocrats and military contractors.

  It should come as no surprise that the corporate media-political complex has to make the presidential contest into a reality show to attract our limited attentions and to sell us lots of products. We're consumers, not citizens.

So first, they put on a contrived show with the ostensible purpose of honoring the troops. They invited a few carefully selected, attractive, articulate, not obviously maimed or damaged military veterans to pose questions to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. (No Howard Stern trolls were there to spoil things, thank goodness.) The candidates mouthed their platitudes in carefully truncated soundbites, and the viewing audience was urged to feel appropriately guilty about how little we think about the troops and how patriotic we ought to feel.

Next, the candidates tried to instill fear in the viewing audience by pointing out what a violent mess the world is in, and what a violent mess their opponent is. The camera panned to the scowling generals in the audience to further instill the terror and the respect in our hearts and our minds. Or, so the Masters of the Universe are hoping.

Third, Matt Lauer made it all about his vapid self with his frequent outbursts of rudeness and vapidity. He was designed to make us circle the wagons around our favored candidate. And better yet, to pick a side in case we were still undecided or disgusted with both of them.

Finally, the rest of the mass media is fulfilling its own assigned role by making the presidential town hall all about Matt Lauer's horrible acting skills and his basic ignorance, arrogance and ineptitude. The common complaint is that he bullied Hillary over her emails, and gave Donnie a pass. Thus the show fulfilled its useful idiotic purpose of adding more fuel to the Defense of Hillary (DOH) fire. It deflected attention from war for war's sake, to the alleged sexist war on Hillary.

Lauer is being castigated both for being too much of a shark and for acting like a guppy.

  For example, here was Michael Grynbaum's front page New York Times review:

Charged with overseeing a live prime-time forum with Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton — widely seen as a dry run of sorts for the coming presidential debates — Mr. Lauer found himself besieged on Wednesday evening by critics of all political stripes, who accused the anchor of unfairness, sloppiness and even sexism in his handling of the event.

Granted 30 minutes with each candidate, who appeared back-to-back at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan, Mr. Lauer devoted about a third of his time with Mrs. Clinton to questions about her use of a private email server, then seemed to rush through subsequent queries about weighty topics like domestic terror attacks.

When an Army veteran in the audience asked Mrs. Clinton to describe her plan to defeat the Islamic State, Mr. Lauer interjected before the candidate could begin her reply.

“As briefly as you can,” he said, one of several moments where the anchor spoke over Mrs. Clinton to remind her that their time was running short.

Nobody in the mainstream media is questioning this country's pathological addiction to trillion-dollar wars, illegal coups, and drone assassinations, or why and how the Pentagon and the CIA and Homeland Security and the NSA have all become so unaccountable in the first place. They're ignoring the awful reality that the Deep State is now our all-powerful fourth branch of government.

Once upon a time, that honor and duty was reserved for our vaunted free press, a/k/a the intrepid Fourth Estate.

The DOH Also Rises

From the Sardonicky Online Dictionary:

DOH.

1. (noun) acronym for Defense Of Hillary, a loose coalition of liberal pundits joining forces to squelch any and all legitimate criticism of the embattled Democratic Party nominee.

a) Variation: Dohdohs. Centrist and liberal pundits on steroids who are doubling down on their efforts to smear any and all critics of Hillary Clinton as pathological haters, misogynists, secret Trump supporters, and unwitting tools of Vladimir Putin. If you are paying more attention to the content of leaked emails proving Democratic complicity to destroy Bernie Sanders than you are to the source, you are un-American for refusing to join the shoot-the-messenger firing squad.

You might be tempted to confuse Dohdohs with David Brooks's Bobos, the coalition of cool, rich, hip, credentialed Bourgeois Bohemians. The difference is that Dohdohs are all too real, while Bobos are the fever dreams of a right-wing pop sociologist who has since failed upwards to an op-ed perch at the New York Times. (more about that paper soon.) 

 Dohdohs are also not be confused with the Dodo, which went extinct largely because of its trusting stupidity and too much inbreeding on its remote island habitat. Although inbred themselves, Dohdohs are very much alive during these waning days of Neoliberal Death Match 2016.

Duh

2. Doh: (epithet, mild swear word). As immortalized by Homer Simpson, "Doh!" is an inchoate expression of deep chagrin, often accompanied by a slap to the forehead. It is alternately spelled  "D'Oh!" in order to distinguish it from the cheap plasticine glop (Play-Doh) recently distributed by Donald Trump to Baton Rouge flood victims as a cynical substitute for food, medicine, and building supplies.

True

False

For purposes of Hillary Clinton and this blog-post, I propose to combine the two meanings of DOH and make this into a true Clinton-style Third Way initiative:

3) DOH: a coalition of Clinton defenders who are Homerically challenged, chagrined, and sincerely confused that the majority of Americans simply do not trust the living antithesis to the reviled Donald Trump. Instead of violently slapping their foreheads in self-loathing, however, they merely scratch or massage their weary erudite pates as they Tweet and they blog and they editorialize their Defense of Hillary displeasure far and wide.

There Is Nothing Playful About True DOH

The most compulsive self-Tweeting (10,000 ReTweets and counting!) DOH operative this week has got to be habitual Clinton supporter Paul Krugman (pictured above), who brands himself the liberal conscience of the Times. As such, out of an abundance of moral rectitude, his new persona is the heroic scold of journalism. In his latest column, he excoriates the smears and innuendoes of the corporate media against his favored candidate. He is so brave, in fact, that he even "reluctantly" dared to criticize his very own newspaper - without, mind you, taking his daredevil act quite so far as to actually mention his employer and his colleagues by name. But you know who you are, Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin! Uncle Paul is not well pleased, and neither is his client.

I already covered Krugman's hypocritical DOH in my Monday post. 

But Glenn Greenwald adds some much-needed bulk and spice to the increasingly thin gruel of journalism in the public interest. He reports that the Paper of Record initially even refused to Tweet out Krugman's Number One trending smash hit of a staged morality play.

And, Greenwald drily notes:

Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats, nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of Hillary Clinton.
That’s because — in contrast to his actually brave, orthodoxy-defying work in 2002 as one of the few media voices opposed to the invasion of Iraq, for which he deserves eternal credit — Krugman here is doing little more than echoing conventional media wisdom. That prominent journalists are overwhelmingly opposed to Donald Trump is barely debatable; their collective contempt for him is essentially out in the open, which is where it should be. Contrary to Krugman’s purported expectation, countless Clinton-supporting journalists rushed to express praise for Krugman. Indeed, with very few exceptions, U.S. elites across the board — from both parties, spanning multiple ideologies — are aligned with unprecedented unity against Donald Trump. The last thing required to denounce him, or to defend Hillary Clinton, is bravery.

Not to be outdone in the DOH sweepstakes is Heather "Digby" Parton, who writes in Salon with all the DOH umbrage she can muster. First, she takes aim at the mildy acerbic liberal Chris Cilizza, who had the outrageous effrontery to read the polls and accurately observe:

This election is about voters choosing the least worst candidate. That's where we are in our politics.

11:43 AM - 4 Sep 2016

Digby cannot abide with this particular dude, fuming: 

That jaded comment by a member of the media, however, illustrates something  important. Some members of the press are not just commenting on a reality; they are pushing the theme of two equally unpalatable candidates and it just isn’t true.

 (It's the dreaded dragon of false equivalence raising its ugly jade-green head!)

And then she falls into the convenient trap which holds that since no direct bribery has been proven regarding the Clinton Foundation, it follows that no corruption can possibly exist through the mere co-mingling of a billion-dollar private enterprise and a government agency. After all, everybody else in Washington swims in the incestuous muck, including members of DOH themselves. And if renegade journalists are seen as picking on Hillary and only on Hillary, it just logically follows that such massive buck-raking has been a normal, natural, aboveboard activity all along, making capitalism our democracy absolutely thrive. Or so DOH says. Or if it's dancing that you crave, just DOHsey DOH your public-private partner.

"I had to laugh," Digby wrote chucklingly, "at Sunday’s silly New York Times story about Hillary Clinton hobnobbing with wealthy donors as if that were a shocking display of arrogant elitism. Compare and contrast that with this story from 2012 about President Obama hobnobbing with wealthy donors portrayed as an unpleasant but necessary duty in a time of big money dominance. One cannot escape the fact that Clinton is being held to a different standard."

Oh yeah? Digby obviously didn't read the surfeit of both progressive and mainstream publications (such as here, here, and here) for ample evidence that Obama, too, has been quite harshly criticized for money-grubbing from the rich and famous. He raised an estimated billion dollars during his second campaign, spending unprecedented time and untold gallons of polluting jet fuel on Air Force One en route to Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street for a veritable orgy of odious hobnobbing and legalized bribery. There are plenty of observers who've noted the corruption in the Obama White House - including, most famously, Senator Elizabeth Warren. She aptly noted in 2014 that the current administration, the Bush administration, and the first Clinton administration have all been absolutely lousy with Citigroup executives.

Hillary Clinton is actually unfairly and overprotectively being singled out for immunity by the likes of Krugman, Digby and The Nation's Joan Walsh, to name just three of the teeming DOH brigade. Walsh's tired one-note refrain is that every criticism of Hillary has its deep ugly roots in sexism.

My own personal favorite DOH essay of all time was written by Clinton star surrogate America Ferrara, who currently plays an unbelievably happy and chipper Walmart employee on TV. She far surpasses Krugman, Digby and Walsh, for the sole reason that she doesn't limit herself to simply defending Hillary from the slings and arrows of outrageous journalism. She DOHtingly projects a positive, caring, strong Hillary persona. Because it is not enough to loathe Trump in order to propel Clinton to victory.

America Ferrara announces to all who will listen that "Hillary Thrills the Hell Out of Me!"

Me and Hillary, Netflix and chilling. Photo credit: Derek Garbryszak.

It's a shining example of the kind of positive and fair and acceptable Clintonian journalism that any member of DOH would be proud of, and should strive to emulate every day of their writing careers:

She’s the kind of woman I’d share a bottle of wine with. Maybe this is my vagina’s fault, but maybe I really heart Hillary because I was raised by a single mother who woke up everyday and did the unglamorous and grueling work of providing for her six children. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve come to recognize and admire Hillary for showing up, day in and day out, for the promise of unsexy, slow-going and hard-won progress.

I’d like to literally stream Netflix and chill with Hillary. Seriously, I’d be down to snuggle in onesies with a pint of mint chocolate chip and do a Gilmore Girls binge with Secretary Clinton.

Offense, Not Defense. You Go, Hillary Girl. USA! USA! USA!

Watch out for falling shiny shards from that shattered glass ceiling. And rejoice, ye of little faith. Live, love, laugh and be happy. Stay on the sunny side of life. May a smile be your umbrella protecting you from shards. Empower your brand. Lean In. Preferably toward your right.

Update: A second generation of Dohdohs appears to be rising. Let's call them the Dohdohdohs: pundits who are now making it their crusade to defend the Hillary Defenders. See, for example, this outraged screed bashing the critics bashing Paul Krugman for bashing the Hillary bashers.

Oh, and about that coughing fit adding even more fodder to the newer journalistic genre of Hillary health-bashing. It's not that she had a severe coughing fit that has me worried. It's that she tried to talk her way through it instead of sitting down to rest and maybe take a discreet puff or two of Albuterol to relax her airways. Trying to brazen your way through a medical crisis to show how tough you are is never a good idea. I know. I've been there, done that, much to my detriment.

Privatizing the Kill List

Facing a shortage in credentialed military personnel, the Obama administration is outsourcing part of its drone assassination program to unaccountable corporations. What could possibly go wrong?

According to the government, nothing much. You see, the private contractors operating the drones aren't actually allowed to pull the trigger on the "militants" (defined by the CIA as all males in "tribal areas" in the primes of their lives) whom they are tasked with suspecting and surveilling and identifying as bad guys.

From the New York Times:

 But there is no limit on the type of reconnaissance they can perform, and they are providing live video feeds of battles and special operations.

As the Obama administration has accelerated its campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and Libya over the past 10 months, the Pentagon has added four drones flown by contractors to the roughly 60 that are typically flown every day by uniformed Air Force personnel.

This is adding mission creep to the mission creep. Today it's four, tomorrow it's eight. Because drones gotta fly and military contractors like Boeing and Raytheon gotta profit.

For purposes of absolving politicians and Pentagon officials of any personal accountability for their extra-judicial killing sprees,

 The number and identities of contractors working on the drone flights are considered classified information, the Air Force said. But Pentagon officials said there are at least several hundred contractors, many of them former drone or fighter pilots who are making double or triple their military salaries.

Where, they must be asking themselves, do I sign up for this gig at triple my lousy grunt salary? Why risk my life flying an airplane when I can retire early and make big bucks operating a joystick out of an air-conditioned trailer?

All of a sudden, within the same New York Times article, there are hundreds of eager beavers vying for only a handful of official drone control jobs. So here's the implicit message: let's artificially improve the United States employment rate by creating hundreds of new jobs building and operating a drone fleet on steroids. It gives a whole new meaning to trickle-down economics. Instead of trickling down, though, the benefits buzz around in the sky for a bit before zooming straight to the ground. Ka-ching and ka-boom! 

But in 2014, President Obama ordered a stepped-up military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Later that year, Mr. Obama, who had said that a small number of troops remaining behind in Afghanistan would have no combat role, decided to authorize a more expansive mission for them.

The Air Force was not prepared for this increased demand. Finding pilots was difficult. They typically work long hours in windowless rooms staring at computer monitors and do not get many days off. Many of those who fly armed drones have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder because they have witnessed so many airstrikes. There is also a powerful perception in the Air Force that drone jobs are less prestigious and glamorous than flying more traditional military aircraft, and recruitment has been hard.

OK, so the solution is to give these poor stressed-out drone pilots a break by bringing in constant new recruits for PTSD. This is called instilling some basic human decency into the Kill List. The war-mongers want us to believe that, despite the fact that new hires will be making as much as triple their military pay, it's hard to find recruits. The office ambience is a bit below-par. There's not as much glitter and glamour to long-distance murder as there is in making direct eye contact with your human targets before blasting them to bits. Maybe they can quadruple the pay and tack on an extra week of paid vacation. More likely, they will lower the professional standards. Since our politicians keep harping on a "skills gap" among jobless and underemployed graduates, perhaps our for-profit colleges can add a few Internet courses in drone operation. The market possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, the Times piece gets even more Orwellian:

Operating drones requires an extensive support network. One pilot and a camera operator typically control a drone, and since a drone is expected to be constantly in the air, each one must have several crews. The analysis of the footage taken in by the drones is even more labor intensive. For every drone, there is a need for up to four dozen analysts who can look at the many hours of footage to assess the targets and other intelligence.

With little alternative, the Air Force initiated a “get-well plan” in January 2015 that included several measures — among them an increase in pay — to try to alleviate the significant “stress on the force” that had developed.

How sweet. The Pentagon is having a Hallmark moment over its Hellfire missiles. Hitmen (and women) for hire in the private sector must be coddled and even sent get-well cards for all that incipient PTSD and eye-strain and aching backs. Forget about the innocent people on the ground getting killed or maimed by Predator and Reaper drones. They rarely get a mention, let alone an apology or compensation. It's not a part of the Drone Playbook. If they were expecting a sympathy card from America, they can think again.

Air Force officials said there are many safeguards in place to train and monitor contractors. But the officials declined to provide many details about the flights, such as where the contractors are deployed and which companies are operating the flights.

The officials also declined to address the role that contractors play in a select group of highly classified drone flights that the Air Force conducts daily for the C.I.A. Air Force pilots, who are essentially on loan to the C.I.A., fly those drones while the agency does its own preflight target planning and post-mission analysis.

We're the American Deep State. Just trust us. If you were expecting transparency over which private corporations are receiving lucrative contracts on your dime for purposes of killing people in your name, you can think again. But, they grudgingly admit,

 Contractors are typically compensated far more than service members, and some current and former senior Air Force officials said their use could actually exacerbate the shortage in military drone pilots because the pay of the private sector might lure them away.

Ya think? So pretty soon, we won't need a regular military at all. It's the capitalism, stupid. And privateers are under no obligation to disclose anything to the public. They only demand that the public pay for everything.

To its credit, the Times does give us a hint on one corporation that is profiting from privatized drone kills, without admitting outright that it is a direct beneficiary of the outsourcing.  In true Orwellian spirit, it is called Resilient Solutions Ltd. Its motto is Your Mission First.

According to its webpage, it was awarded an Air Force contract in May to provide

Advisory and Assistance Services to the Air Force Safety Center (AFSEC), Aviation Safety Division, Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Branch. The RSL Team supports AFSEC's RPA safety programs, involving studies, analysis, evaluation, engineering and technical services to the combatant commanders and major commands (MAJCOMs). The AFSEC Remotely Piloted Aircraft Mishap Prevention program utilizes the RSL team to support Safety Investigation Boards, investigate RPA mishaps, and facilitate the safe integration of RPA operations within the National Airspace Program. Services provided by Resilient Solutions include Safety System Engineering, MQ 1/9 operational expertise, Airspace/Air Traffic Control subject matter experts, RPA Human Factors subject matter experts, RPA maintenance subject matter experts, and Research Analysis.

I could be wrong, but I think that this is Newspeak for "We help you kill people efficiently and responsibly and then help you shove it all under the rug."

Among Resilient Solutions' other listed clients is the New York Times, a factoid which the Paper of Record chose not to disclose.