The New Red Scare: Fake News

Fresh off her failure to fool enough of the people some of the time, Hillary Clinton has pivoted to trying to convince the people whom she failed to fool that they are a bunch of fools.

The Empress-in-Waiting might have had one dream destroyed, but that isn't stopping her from posing as the Empress-in-Exile.

 If you thought that Hillary was going to go quietly into that good night of one of her fortified palaces, you foolishly thought wrong. 

If you also thought that, like most other people, she is scared witless about Donald Trump's formation of a military junta assisted by a claque of kleptocrats depraved enough to make even Caligula blush, you thought wrong again.

Hillary's comeback consists of pretending that the scurrilous rumor mill - something which has probably been an integral part of human civilization ever since the first hominid landed on her feet after being pushed out of a tree by a bully - is suddenly the Threat To End All Threats.

 There's supposedly an epidemic of Fake News devouring the brains of our nation, but Hillary Clinton is here to immunize you through the magic bullet of censorship. 

While everybody else either is hysterical or depressed about the lethal, real-world consequences of the Trump presidency, Hillary is more worried about the Clinton World consequences of #PizzaGate. That's the hashtag  given to a weekend incident in which a paranoid guy fired shots into the floor of a Washington D.C. eatery after arriving there to check out for himself a deranged online rumor about a Hillary-run pedophile ring.

So, before arriving on Capitol Hill to say goodbye to outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday, Hillary arrived at the pizza joint to check out for herself the true news reports about the fake news reports.

But rather than use her TV time to urge citizens to use their own common sense before brandishing their unregulated weapons, and rather than urge immediate emergency funding for the teaching of critical thinking skills in public schools, Hillary is calling instead for massive government censorship. Leaders in both the public and private sectors should act immediately to "snuff out" stories which they deem to be bogus:

 "The epidemic of fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the last year ― it’s now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences,” Clinton said.
“This isn’t about politics or partisanship,” she continued. “Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities. It’s a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly.”

Clinton implies that there is such a thing as good, government-sanctioned propaganda. An example of good propaganda might be the selling of the Iraq War by the establishment media based upon bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction. This propaganda resulted in the deaths and displacements of millions of innocent people.

Good propaganda might be her own selling of the deadly bombing of Libya based upon false claims that Muammar al-Qaddafi was on the verge of exterminating his own people.

 It might be the running deficit-hawk narrative that "Social Security and Medicare are going broke" used by politicians and the mainstream media to sell the neoliberal program of pain and austerity for the many, and prosperity for the plutocrats - some of whom comprise Donald Trump's cabinet.

Ordinary citizens' lives are indeed at risk as they go about their precarious business working at their precarious jobs. Neoliberalism as preached by Clinton and both sides of the Uniparty has served to increase the national mortality rate to its highest level in two decades. Good propaganda outlets like the New York Times report that all the experts are ever so surprised that so many victims of the neoliberal class war are suicidally depressed, or addicted to drugs, or eating cheap unhealthy food, or not using their high deductible health plans, and then dying so tragically young.

When Hillary was running for president, it was the epidemic of opioid addiction that she said was the most pressing social issue of our time. Now that she's not running, it's those vile yet silly rumors about her on the Internet.(Which is odd, because nowhere on her campaign website is there one single mention of the fake news epidemic destroying all our lives.)

Meanwhile, that bogus Washington Post story boosting a slimy blacklisting Internet site called PropOrNot turns out to have Clinton machine and State Department and CIA fingerprints smeared all over it. Investigative journalist Mark Ames looks into the sourcing:

The only specific clues given were an admission that at least one of its members with access to its Twitter handle is “Ukrainian-American”. They had given this away in a handful of early Ukrainian-language tweets, parroting Ukrainian ultranationalist slogans, before the group was known.
One PropOrNot tweet, dated November 17, invokes a 1940s Ukrainian fascist salute “Heroiam Slava!!” to cheer a news item on Ukrainian hackers fighting Russians. The phrase means “Glory to the heroes” and it was formally introduced by the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at their March-April 1941 congress in Nazi occupied Cracow, as they prepared to serve as Nazi auxiliaries in Operation Barbarossa.

Ames notes that the language of the PropOrNot site and that of Ukraine-based blacklisting and censorship efforts are remarkably similar. And he notes a direct link between a Ukrainian lobbyist and the Democratic National Committee:

  One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

Ames further notes that Yahoo News named Chalupa one of the 16 key influencers of the Democratic campaign and the main impetus behind reports that Russia interfered with the election and boosted the chances of Donald Trump.

As I read Ames's piece, I could have sworn I was in the throes of a John Le Carre novel.

Glenn Greenwald writes that MSDNC and other mainstream outlets were also complicit in the "good," Clinton-approved propaganda. They all helped spread the bogus claims that the damaging emails released by Wikileaks were all fakes. To bolster that claim, one "Trump operative"  who named himself Omnivore posted a fake speech by Hillary to Goldman Sachs to trick her opponents into citing him. It was just such a tactic that got Dan Rather fired after citing a planted forged document to bolster the otherwise legitimate claim that George W. Bush skipped out on his Air National Guard training.

Even after Omnivore was exposed as a Clinton plant, the fake news that all the Wikileaks documents were faked continues to be spread by corporate "real news" sites.

As I reported during the waning days of the campaign, one of my own articles, cross-posted on Truthout (one of PropOrNot's blacklisted sites) was caught up in the cache of the Democratic National Committee emails provided by Wikileaks. I can personally attest that it was not a fake. I wrote every word of it. It's in the cache because Campaign Director John Podesta apparently subscribes to Truthout. So Hillary should probably warn him about this clear and present danger to his brain.

It just goes to show you that American fascism, like American propaganda, is not an epidemic suddenly unleashed upon us in the Age of Trump. It's been around for a very long time. And it has usually been well-hidden by the gloss of democracy and liberalism.

 Not any more. The veneer is not only showing cracks, it is coming apart at the seams.

Update: Under political pressure,President Obama has now ordered a full investigation of the alleged Russian infiltration of American democracy and the electoral process. The New York Times reports, however, that the actual results of this alleged investigation may never be released to the public. Otherwise Russia might steal our investigation techniques! 

In other words, what we don't know can't possibly eat our brains. 

So carry on. Buy the latest gadgets, consume approved propaganda content, and go about your precarious business as you struggle to be a finalist in the mortality sweepstakes.

Update 2: Within hours of Obama announcing the investigation, the Washington Post quoted secret anonymous sources as reporting that the CIA has already secretly decided - with the usual "high level of confidence" - that Russian operatives did indeed hack into the DNC and John Podesta's emails and furnished the caches to Wikileaks as a direct ploy to help elect Donald Trump. The New York Times adds that a similar Russian hack of the Republican National Committee did not result in any fair and balanced leakage. Oh what a sticky, tangled web.

The Price Is Ryan

There's been a lot of scary buzz lately about Washington's newest Gruesome Twosome (House Speaker Paul Ryan and HHS Secretary-Designate Tom Price) publicly drooling over taking the buzz-saw to Medicare.

No matter that even VP-elect Mike Pence vowed as late as this past Sunday that the Trump administration would protect Medicare. No matter that even Ayn Rand fanboy Ryan admitted on 60 Minutes that the privatization of Medicare might have to wait until such time that Republicans - who'd truly love to slash it to bits, yesterday - won't be quite as vulnerable to the wrath of the old people in their respective districts. If Ryan has inside dope that vulnerable voting seniors are dying off more quickly than dopey pols, he didn't say.

Vulnerable Democrats and their veal pen offshoots, meanwhile, are in a frenzy of fund-raising and flailing around the meme that Medicare As We Know It Is Doomed the minute Donald Trump takes the oath of office. As usual, they are placing themselves in a purely defensive crouch. Rather than boldly re-introducing HR 676 or a similar Medicare for All single payer health care bill, they vow to simply fight back and protect what little we already have. It's so much more virtue-signalling fun to shoot diseased fish in a barrel than it is to be therapeutically proactive and progressive.

Medicare actually would have been more vulnerable to attack under a Clinton administration. Hillary ran her winning campaign on, among other things, praising the austerity plan of the Bowles-Simpson Cat Food Commission. Bill Clinton, who would have been "in charge of the economy," had hoped to play Good Cop to Paul Ryan's Bad Cop in the triangulation game. They might even be called the original Gruesome Twosome, as evidenced by an open mic catching them openly plotting Grandma's fate a couple of years ago.

For, as evidenced by the Clintonoid welfare "reform" package of the 90s, it is only through the collusion of both sides of the Right Wing Party that people can be punished. If the Democrats and Republicans can cancel each other out in the Sadism Sweepstakes, voters will never know what really hit them. They won't know who to blame for the sudden loss in their basic standards of living. They will again be forced to hold their noses and vote for the lesser evil. (Democrats really, really tried. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't be a purist.)

As far as Donald Trump is concerned, his selection of Tom Price for Health and Human Services Secretary would seem to be in direct conflict with his vow to protect Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. A bone-cutter by trade, Dr. Price not only wants to cut social programs to the bone, he wants to perform a radical amputation. So, can the two Republican sadists (Price and Ryan) from the Island of Dr. Moreau succeed in triangulating as ably with Trump as they could have with Clinton? We will have to wait and see. As with everything else in the Trump administration, it's still a mystery.

The New York Times explains that Price's main allegiance is to the greedy and powerful members of the American Medical Association, who have historically made it their business to prevent universal health care coverage for everybody.

Throughout his career, Mr. Price — who has been picked by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be secretary of health and human services — has argued that the government should get out of the way of doctors and give patients more control over their health care.

This position is rooted in Mr. Price’s experience as an orthopedic surgeon for more than 20 years. “As a physician,” he said in the House in 2007, “I know oh so well how the intervention of the state and federal government into the practice of medicine destroys the ability to take care of people. It makes it so you can’t provide quality health care for children and moms and dads.”

What the Times doesn't tell you: orthopedic surgeons have been legally thwarted from the practice of price-gouging, receiving kickbacks or bribes and profiting personally from the sale of orthopedic and other medical devices. Price's specialty is also subject to some of the highest medical malpractice insurance rates in the country. Even with their off-shored accounts and LLCs, they're in the highest income tax bracket. If they can't keep everything they earn and if they can't charge egregious above-Medicare rates, then they might as well destroy Medicare. If it weren't for Medicare, the orthopods could make enough money to pay for a third vacation home and a fifth luxury sports-car. But instead of admitting this, they scapegoat old people.  According to Price and his ilk, Granny is literally shoving little kids with easy and profitable greenstick fractures out of her way in her own selfish quest for a price-controlled hip replacement. The price just isn't right enough to suit Price.

 Price even likes to describe the slave-owning Founders as champions of wealthy orthopedic surgeons. The Times article continues: 

And in 2010, when Congress approved the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Price called it “a dark day for America,” saying that “our founders are weeping” over a bill that was “an affront to federalism, an affront to individual liberty.”

Senate Democrats are sure to challenge many of his positions at his confirmation hearings. Just as they distrust him on health care, he distrusts them.

“The true desire of those on the left,” Mr. Price said on the House floor in 2007, “is to gradually and enticingly move all Americans to Washington-controlled bureaucratic health care.” The bureaucracy, he said, is “not nimble like the private sector.”

The scariest aspect of Price's tenure at HHS is that he is apt to behave as much as a fascistic strongman as his boss. Directors of the agency have always enjoyed the power to act unilaterally, to tweak rules and regulations at their whim. So Price might not even need Ryan as much as Ryan needs him. It's hard out there for a flim-flam man acting out his sadistic fantasies all by his lonesome.

Come on Down! (graphic by Kat Garcia)

For his part, Ryan hopes to effectuate the increased suffering and swifter deaths of seniors via a cheap voucher or coupon system, which he euphemizes as "premium supports." It would change Medicare from the single payer government system it is today into a program more in tune with the Affordable Care Act. Older people, including Alzheimers patients and those suffering from chronic diseases affecting mentation and physical stamina would be forced to spend days or weeks navigating the "marketplace" of private insurance plans in order to get the least horrible coverage for their meager government buck.

Ryan's colleagues once thought he was crazy for wanting to kill Medicare, but he brought many of the squeamish along to his Ayn Randian way of thinking by also advocating for cuts in education, housing, food assistance to poor families, and veterans' programs. The theory is that if you spread the pain around equally, it is more palatable both to yourself and to your victims. 

And forget about polls showing that 80 percent of Americans -- and that includes Trump voters -- don't want their Medicare touched. Paul Ryan doesn't care about polls. "Leaders are elected to lead and are supposed to change the polls because that's what the country wants," he told David Gregory of NBC back in the austerian good times of 2011.

When Ryan was trying to sell his voucher program a couple of years ago, he hysterically complained that it wasn't fair to call it a voucher system. People might actually suspect that he was trying to kill them. 

So to help poor Paulie and his Price-pal in the newly-named Hell and Inhumane Services Lab, here are a few alternative names for them to chew on while they await their main course:

MediPRIC (Paul Ryan's Insurance Cabal).

MediPOP (Profits Over People).

MediCRAP (Conservative Republicans Against Patients).

MediKIL (Kleptocratic Insurance Limited).

MediSCAM (Social Conservatives Against Mankind).
 
MediCHEAT (Conservatives Hiding Eugenics Agenda Totally).

And, when the Democrats inevitably cave and compromise so as not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, they might offer the following "improvements" to Medicare As We Know It:

MediBUT (Bipartisanship Under Table).

MediPUNT (Pragmatism Until New Term).

MediSTRIP (Surrender to Republicans in Peace).

Water Protectors Get Reprieve

Maybe it was the incipient televised public relations disaster of militarized police doing battle with military veterans acting as human shields for the protesters that finally forced the Obama administration's hand.

But whatever the motivation - fear of democracy, pragmatism or a genuine concern for the environment - the basic human right of clean water has at least temporarily prevailed over Big Oil.

It's a testament to the power and value of human solidarity that for once in a very great while, people have actually won over profits. It helped enormously that celebrities and popular politicians like Tulsi Gabbard and the military son of Democratic bigwig Wesley Clark directly joined the cause and physically showed up at the protest site in frigid, snow-covered North Dakota.

In the face of continuing horrible publicity, the Army Corps of Engineers did an abrupt about-face and announced on Sunday that it would not, after all,  grant the permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline to drill under the Missouri River.

Mind you, this is only the latest reprieve for the Standing Rock Sioux. As stressed in the letter announcing the decision, the government will now "explore alternative routes." The addition of the buzz-phrase "there's more work to be done" in the written decision is neoliberal code for kicking the can down the road until Barack Obama can hand over responsibility for any potential bloodbath or environmental disaster to Donald Trump. If Obama has demonstrated anything during his eight years in office, it's his loathing of direct confrontation.

He'd already waited as patiently as he could throughout months of brutal corporate funded police assaults against the protesters before ordering his first timid temporary halt to further construction this past September. His decision came in the wake of the Army Corps of Engineers overriding the Environmental Protection Agency and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation by giving the green light to pipeline construction beneath the Missouri River, prime source of drinking water for the local population.

Obama, if he wanted to, could Trump-proof the pipeline construction permanently by declaring the region a national monument. But he has preferred not to. He prefers to ride out his term and call himself the good guy in the process. He is being praised far and wide for his statesmanship. In the age of Trump, statesmanship has been reduced to delaying the inevitable.

Trump, who is personally invested in the pipeline, has already trumpeted his intention to resume construction of the $3.8 billion project once he takes office. For one thing, native Americans and Hollywood stars and environmental activists are not part of his voting base. For another thing, he is not about to evoke the wrath of other global finance industry investors which make up "Energy Transfer Partners."  (not to be confused with the diverse cast of characters paid to act in those oily "I'm An Energy Voter" commercials which in turn allowed CNN and others to give Trump his $5 billion worth of free advertising time -- which propelled him to victory.)

The oil profiteers, Energy Transfer Partners, and Republicans in Congress might be pretending to kvetch about the Corps of Engineers' delaying tactics now, but just wait a few weeks. This is only a petty skirmish to these pathocrats. The brutal class warriors do not give up. 

Ruling Class Worrywarts

When Larry Summers says he's worried about Donald Trump, you can bet the banks he helped deregulate back in the 90s that his concern has nothing to do with how regular people will fare under the plutocrat-heavy Trump administration.

On the contrary. Larry Summers is scared that Trump will destroy capitalism itself. That much-ballyhooed Carrier deal brokered by the president-elect, which will save about 700 Indiana factory jobs from being outsourced to Mexico, is a slap in the face to the economy as rich people have known it, loved it, and profited by it.

Without a hint of irony, Summers writes in a Washington Post op-ed:

I have always thought of American capitalism as dominantly rule and law based. Courts enforce contracts and property rights in ways that are largely independent of just who it is who is before them. Taxes are calculable on the basis of an arithmetic algorithm. Companies and governments buy from the cheapest bidder. Regulation follows previously promulgated rules. In the economic arena, the state’s monopoly on the use of force is used to enforce contract and property rights and to enforce previously promulgated laws.

Never mind that the laws of capitalism were written for the sole benefit of corporations and CEOs and trust fund kids. Never mind that no-bid contracts have been an operating principle of unaccountable government spending for decades, if not centuries. Never mind that the repeal of the Depression-era  Glass-Steagall Act, which Summers helped orchestrate during the Clinton administration, was in essence itself a repudiation of the controlled capitalism which Summers now purports to adore. Summers also worked with Citigroup's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan to deregulate the derivatives market. Later, he successfully thwarted an adequate stimulus package during his stint in the Obama administration.

Summers has never in his life fought for American workers or against the offshoring of jobs by multinational corporations searching for ever cheaper and exploitable human labor. It's no surprise, therefore, that the Carrier deal would give him agita. It would give him agita even if it were not steeped in crony capitalist motivations.

Summers' beef is that Trump aims to turn the "lawful" plunder and privatization model right on its ear and make us into a full-fledged Banana Republic, just like in (gasp!) Putin's Russia.

And since the Democrats are still blaming everyone but Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump's victory, Summers also takes the obligatory dig at Bernie Sanders, whom Summers claims "misses the point" by complaining that not all the Carrier jobs were saved from Mexico outsourcing.

And now comes the coup de grâce. Summers blames Democracy itself:

 Some of the worst abuses of power are not those that leaders inflict on their people. They are the acts that the people demand from their leaders. I fear in a way that is more fundamental than a bad tax policy or tariff we have started down the road of changing the operating assumptions of our capitalism. I hope I am wrong, but I expect that as a consequence we are going to be not only poorer but less free.

Translation: with Trump around, the rich may end up being unable to loot from the poor as legally and responsibly as they always have in the past. And it's all the fault of those poor people, who turn out to be not only stupid, but abusive and power-mad. Didn't they ever learn that consumerism is their only responsibility? Didn't they ever learn that "democracy" and voting rights are only the bait and switch tactics designed to disguise the awful truth that Capitalism rules?

The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who has been on his own interminable roll of blaming everything from white racists and the FBI and Wikileaks to Putin and "fake news" sites for Hillary's defeat, thinks his colleague Larry is really on to something. Krugman is so upset about the positive media coverage of the Carrier deal that he even seems to have forgotten that Barack Obama is not only still the president, but that Obama has assured the nation that if Trump succeeds, America succeeds. 

Krugman writes:

It says that large parts of the news media, whose credulous Trump coverage and sniping at HRC helped bring us to where we are, will be even worse, even more poodle-like, now that this guy is in office.

Meanwhile, as Larry Summers says, the precedent — although tiny — is not good: it’s not just crony capitalism, it’s government as protection racket, where companies shape their strategies to appease politicians who will reward or punish based on how it affects their PR efforts and/or personal fortunes. That is, we’re looking at what may well be the beginning of a descent into banana republic governance.

This is, as Larry says, bad both for the economic (sic) and for freedom.

The most pressing concern he has is for the freedoms of the law-abiding robber barons. It seems as though the petty sniping by Wall Street Democrats at the HRC sniper-haters will go on for the foreseeable future. Party elites and pundits are throwing the same kind of temper tantrum that they accuse Trump of indulging in.

My published response to Krugman: 

So, Larry Summers is more worried about Trump ruining capitalism than he is about unfettered capitalism destroying the lives and livelihoods of working people.

Trump is performing the con abnormally. Therefore, grouses Summers (one of the three guys who "saved the world" by destroying it through deregulation), we have a fatal inversion. Instead of politicians passing laws to appease the corporations, we now have corporations appeasing a grossly incompetent anti-politician interested only in his own fortunes.

The Precursors and Enablers of Donald J. Trump

Trump is only a symptom - really, the excrescence - of the neoliberalism and resulting record wealth inequality which has been spawning right-wing populism all over the world.

Summers is worried that Trumpian crony capitalism is bad for the economy. But whose economy? It seems to me that he is really talking about the plutonomy: ownership of a financialized system which mainly benefits the 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population. Trump wants to be a member of that Club.

The working class - white, brown and black - doesn't factor in to the equation, other than elite worry-warts blaming them for not voting for the right candidate.

The bright spot is that even before he's sworn in (assuming he doesn't forget to show up to deliver a bizarre stream-of-consciousness inaugural riff) Trump voters are already expressing buyers' remorse. Apparently, some thought that their giant middle finger to the establishment was only symbolic.

Speaking of buyers' remorse, there's a neologism that should join "post-truth" in that annual list of verbal novelties put out by Lake Superior University. And that is "Trumpgrets."

Raw Story has the scoop on the whole gamut of raw emotions emanating from desperate people who couldn't care less if the plutocrats robbing them blind do it based on an Ivy League education and corner office, or if they do it out of unabashed ignorance and greed while wearing a red baseball cap.

But be warned: you have to be willing to laugh at and feel superior to all the remorseful Trump voters out there. In other words, you have to be a clueless liberal for whom the word "solidarity" is still missing from your intolerant vocabulary.

Tweety Bird Trump

I Tawt I Taw a Media Puddy Cat... I Did, I Did!

The top-trending story of the last 24-hour news cycle has been Donald Trump's outrageously silly Tweet about flag-burning. Forget the water protectors of North Dakota waging the most important civil rights battle of this century. Forget the raging deadly wildfire in Tennessee, caused at least in part by man-made climate change. Forget even perhaps the scariest presidential cabinet of sadistic plutocrats in American history.

Forget everything you've heard about the mass media's group resolution to finally hold the president-elect's feet to the fire, in the wake of their gifting his successful campaign with an estimated $5 billion worth of free advertising. Forget the lessons-learned chagrin that the more prominent media stars expressed only last week, after an elite group of them agreed to an off-the-record meeting in Trump Tower. Their desired access to power predictably turned into yet another classic Trump ambush.

It's magic. Whenever Donald Trump's thumbs move across his electronic device and his 140 characters swirl down into the maelstrom of the psycho-sphere, the media drops everything. They Tweet and they re-Tweet, and they stop the presses, and they rapidly converge their usual panels of experts to express their outrage and shock and confusion.

Here's what had all the pundit panties in a twist on Tuesday:

I lost count how many times CNN anchors asked, hour after hour after hour, whether Trump has read the Constitution and whether he might, in fact, end up ordering flag-burners imprisoned or disenfranchised without due process. And well they probably should, because presidents already have the power to drone people to death, anywhere on earth, without charge or trial. The press has mostly failed to Tweet or otherwise report on the terrifying news that Barack Obama has just awesomely enhanced Trump's ability to kill people anywhere on earth by simply giving a thumbs-up to his private army of assassins.

As Trevor Timm writes in The Guardian,

 In all the outrage about the unhinged things Donald Trump keeps tweeting and saying, there’s been almost zero criticism at the fact that Obama will be partly responsible for the extraordinary scope of powers Trump inherits. The Obama administration has not only done nothing to curtail the slew of extreme national security and war powers that Trump is about to acquire since the election – the White House is actively expanding them.

Despite the horror of bequeathing unprecedented unitary war and extermination powers to a new chief executive considered by Obama himself to be mentally unstable, the fraught dilemma of how to cover Trumpian tweets was the sole topic of a Tuesday conference attended by media stars, pundits, and other practitioners of Pseudo-Journalism in the Age of Trump. Forget their post-Trumpian resolutions about going into the Heartland and interviewing just regular folks as an antidote to their cluelessness.

When in doubt, they still take the easy way out: they interview each other.

The New York Times describes important media personalities talking amongst themselves:

In interviews on Tuesday, political editors and reporters said that, for now, they planned to apply the same news judgment they would apply to any statement by a powerful leader, even as some acknowledged that social media allows Mr. Trump to reduce complicated subjects to snappy, and sometimes misleading, slogans and sound bites.

“Reporting complex policy issues out of tweets, I would say that’s not ideal,” said Carrie Budoff Brown, the newly installed editor of Politico, adding: “We have to treat it as one piece of a bigger reporting puzzle that we have to put together.”

But fundamentally, she said, the thoughts of a president-elect are inherently newsworthy — as long as journalists also provide readers with the right context, like whether a proposal is feasible or legal, or correct a baseless claim.

“This is the way he’s communicating with millions upon millions of people, and as journalists we can’t ignore that,” Ms. Brown said.

It's already taken them the better part of a day to explain to millions and millions of people that they can still burn their flags with impunity, despite a failed 2005 bill co-sponsored by Hillary Clinton that would have made it properly illegal. 

Even though some journalists have become at least semi-aware that Trump's Tweets are orchestrated distractions to keep them from covering his real scandals, they just can't help Tweeting out and printing all the Twitter news coming out of Trump World. 

They are a clowder of gullible Sylvester Cats to Trump's malevolent Tweety.

Donald Trump is so unabashedly cartoonish, you might almost think he deliberately modeled his political persona on the original bullying psychopathic Tweety himself. From Wikipedia:

 In his early appearances in Bob Clampett cartoons, Tweety is a very aggressive character who tries anything to foil his foe, even kicking his enemy when he is down. One of his most notable malicious moments is in the cartoon Birdy and the Beast. A cat chases Tweety by flying until he remembers that cats cannot fly, causing him to fall. Tweety says sympathetically, "Awww, the poor kitty cat! He faw down and go (in a loud, tough, masculine voice) BOOM!!" and then grins mischievously. A similar use of that voice is in A Tale Of Two Kitties when Tweety, wearing an air raid warden's helmet, suddenly yells, "Turn out those lights!" Tweety's aggressive nature was toned down when Friz Freleng started directing the series, with the character turning into a more cutesy bird, usually going about his business, and doing little to thwart Sylvester's ill-conceived plots, allowing them to simply collapse on their own; he became even less aggressive when Granny was introduced, but occasionally Tweety still showed a malicious side.

 Since America hates its revered presidents to be cartoonishly mean and nasty, the media and establishment "Never Trump" politicians are scrambling to make Donald appear normal. Mimicking Tweety's media transformation, Trump has quickly evolved from ugly raving raptor into irascible canary of a president with fluffy feathery hair.

Like his cartoon alter-ego, Trump manages to fool the predatory media cats almost every single time. In the Looney Tunes power hierarchy, Tweety-Donald must always be the winner, and Sylvester-Media is always portrayed as the loser. (see: "Failing New York Times"; "CNN the Network of Liars"; "Deceitful Dishonest Media" epithets at his Trump Tower pundit ambush.) 

Even when journalists think they finally have Trump in their claws or jaws (#PussyGate, evaded taxes, fraud, graft) they end up spitting him right back out. He is not only still alive, he is unscathed.

"Hyde and Go Tweet" is the preferred Trump narrative. Just like in the animated story that has Sylvester making himself a Tweety sandwich out of the bird he thinks he's tamed, Trump keeps reverting back to form. As soon as the media treat Trump as redeemable, he strikes back. Again and again.

They created the monster. They claim they're going to eat him for lunch, but then they continue feeding him a diet full of steroids.

Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Trump and the media are actually two sides of the same entity. Whether the chatter and the spectacle are soothing or violent matters not. What matters is that the public stays tuned in. Lies and deceit become normalized as the various starring actors do battle with each other. Competition is preferable to competence. Ignorance becomes power. Immediate profits are the basis of all economic and social decisions. The freer the enterprise, the more enslaved becomes the population. Ethics are so yesterday.

 Duh... that's all, folks.

A Fraud Wrapped in a Fake Inside of a Fiction

 

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

When going about the miserable job of exposing so-called fake news outlets (translation: any outlet either fairly or unfairly critical of the defeated Hillary Clinton as well as US foreign policy) it's always best to do your dirty work anonymously. You see, if the Russian puppet-masters controlling even such popular progressive American sites as Truthout and Naked Capitalism ever discern your true identity, you run the risk of getting rubbed out by a KGB agent in one of the dark alleys connecting the impulses of your paranoid little mind.

Therefore, in a craven attempt to stifle dissent, to damage lives and livelihoods, and to drum up the loudest possible publicity while still protecting your cowardly hide, you slap up an amateurish website called PropOrNot, and then you shop around your McCarthyesque list of 200 undesirable Internet news sites to the mainstream media.
  
And miracle of miracles - a huge billionaire-owned corporate publication called The Washington Post agrees not only to publish your fraud about fakery wrapped up in fiction, but to protect your identity in the bargain. It's the exact same way that establishment mouthpieces always protect the identities of powerful establishment figures whenever there's a war to be ginned up, or a political opponent to be smeared. You really must be someone special, or at least work for something, or someone, that is very special.

No matter that your brand-new site was exposed as a fraud and fake in its own right within a matter of hours. Who cares?  Your damage has already been done. Your List of Enemy News Sites and enemy journalists continues to be Tweeted and re-Tweeted across the world millions of times. It is still the most popular news item on The Post. Even "respectable" journalists and politicians who otherwise wouldn't have touched your ridiculous smear job of a story with a ten-foot pole have no qualms at all about helpfully and gleefully spreading its nastiness. After all, if the establishment Post saw fit to print it first, serious people certainly are under no obligation to exert either their minds or their moral compasses.

Josh Marshall Verified account ‏@joshtpm

Genuinely incensed at reaction to WaPo/Russian disinfo story. WE WATCHED THIS HAPPEN IN REAL TIME. Specific ways it was done, vectors, etc.

• Retweets 1,270
• Likes 2,192
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6:24 AM - 25 Nov 2016

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 Paul Krugman ‏@paulkrugman Nov 25

Paul Krugman Retweeted Josh Marshall

Yes, yes, yes. Putin role was obvious to everyone except people getting their news from email-obsessed media.

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Dan Pfeiffer Verified account ‏@danpfeiffer

Why isn't this the biggest story in the world right now?

Dan Pfeiffer is the former communications director for Barack Obama, who got the whole "Fake News" ball rolling during his farewell tour of the world last week. Obama is a lot like the anonymous operators of PropOrNot: when he sent out his own press releases of himself touring Athens, he deliberately left out the part where 7,000 demonstrators protested his arrival and in return were tear-gassed and beaten by police for daring to exercise democracy in the birthplace of democracy.

And Paul Krugman should talk. His own work has been regularly published on at least one of the respected progressive sites that PropOrNot has deemed to be "fake news."

We still don't know the identities of the person or persons behind PropOrNot, but judging from the earnestly juvenile quality of the site's rhetoric as well as the asinine quality of their Tweets, I suspect that a gaggle of recent college grads with a major in Safe Spaces were in need of work after their last gig at a certain campaign HQ in Brooklyn. Or maybe it's a couple of refugees from the "Correct the Record" SuperPac run by that other Clintonoid master of agitprop, David Brock of Media Matters.

The PropOrNotters sound like they come from a political oppo research shop, not from a think tank full of credentialed professionals volunteering their time and intellects for the greater public good.  Their latest update, for example, consists of a clip of comedienne Samantha Bee showing what Russian propaganda trolls "look and sound like in real life."

When you visit the site, you're told that your first assignment in "fighting back" against the malign forces of outside-the-Beltway independent journalism is to watch Samantha Bee (a Hillary supporter) on television. 

Because whether you know it or not, you are the victims of an orchestrated Russian campaign to eat your brains for breakfast.

Without even a hint of irony in light of the fact that its own anonymous propaganda was unquestioningly parroted by the Washington Post, PropOrNot accuses such independent sites as CounterPunch and Truthdig of undermining the work of consolidated, corporate-owned news organizations:   

These (independent) sites have US audiences estimated in the millions, parrot Russian state-owned propaganda, and relentlessly attack the important investigative work done by actual American journalists.

PropOrNot no doubt views such relentlessly and righteously attacked hacks as Thomas Friedman and David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer as "actual American journalists." 

There are more proper, preferred sources of information to help manufacture your consent. PropOrNot urges you to consume their corporate content and also to send them some of your money:

• Spread the word: Russia is attempting to manipulate the American people through online propaganda.
• Obtain news from actual reporters, who report to an editor and are professionally accountable for mistakes. We suggest NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed, VICE, etc, and especially your local papers and local TV news channels. Support them by subscribing, if you can!
• Familiarize yourself with this project, at www.propornot.com, and especially our Introduction, Frequently Asked Questions, and Manual Propaganda Analysis example, so you can practice distinguishing between Russian propaganda and actual news for yourself.

The Proper Notters sound an awful lot like the people who inundated Internet comment boards during campaign season. You know the trolls I'm talking about. The ones who called you a Putin tool or a closet Trump supporter every time you espoused Medicare for All, or dared to criticize the Empress-in-Waiting, or praised Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein. One such anonymous troll on New York Times comment threads has accused me on more than one occasion of really being Merry Levov in disguise.

When I Googled Merry Levov, I discovered that she was the bomb-throwing lefty extremist in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. In other words, a fictional character.

So, given the amateur verbiage on the PropOrNot site itself, I wouldn't be surprised if the self-proclaimed credentialed volunteers from the analytics and national security worlds turn out to be nothing but low-level political hacks in disguise.  The very fact that they offer ridiculous, pseudo-scientific methods to detect Russian propaganda is one clue. So is their frequent politician-speak use of the word "folks."

If they truly were such powerful "experts" at the highest levels of the Deep State, and not paranoid trolls sitting in front of a basement computer, would they be sending out silly Tweets like this?

Pinned Tweet

PropOrNot ID Service ‏@propornot Nov 26

Updated report here: http://bit.ly/2fyrUz1  Russian imperialists & bots/trolls are vewwy vewwy upset; we're stoked! #Путінхуйло

0 replies 3 retweets 7 likes

 PropOrNot ID Service ‏@propornot Nov 26

Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject - they're so vewwy angwy!! It's cute We don't censor; just highlight.

If it talks like a troll, walks like a troll and smells like a troll... it's a troll. Or should I say twoll?

As Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald expound in their exhaustive take-down of this scandal:

In casting the group behind this website as “experts,” the Post described PropOrNot simply as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Not one individual at the organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group “to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”

In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda – even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage – while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy but without the courage to attach their names to their blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin Senator, the group refers to its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as “The List.”

The Proper Nutters obviously thrive on all the negative attention. They claim to be receiving new names and suggestions for addition to the Banned List of 200 by the hour. They have only just begun. So much subversion and independent thought, so little time. And to make the situation even more tragic and un-American, some of the site operators they are targeting are completely, innocently unaware that the Russians are controlling their brains and their journalism.

But of course, their aim is not to censor - only to expose. They don't outright accuse the List of 200 of treason, or anything like that. Because this is America. 

Meanwhile, they're champing at the bit to sink their sharp righteous teeth into even more subversion:

1. We will do that as soon as we can sink our analysis tools and review processes into the outlets we've been asked to look into, and we'll be updating our browser plugin as well. Due to different volunteers being responsible for different parts of the option, please note that the list in the plugin is slightly ahead of the list on the website. We will fix that.
2. We are updating our homepage slightly, to give people a better sense for what the Russian folks working to influence US public opinion look and sound like.
3. We are proud to present our updated Black Friday Report, and extremely grateful to everyone who contributed! We look forward to your thoughts, suggestions, and contributions as we move forward. It is available for download here, or can be reivewed (sic) directly below:

 Whereupon all good liberal citizens and Samantha Bee fans are urged to turn one another in. Don't like a blog that makes you feel too angry or depressed? Report it to the Ministry of Truth, post-haste!

When all is said and done, of course, the real culprits here are the Washington Post and its Media-Political Complex co-conspirators and Re-Tweeters. All of them are wantonly discarding all the principles of journalism by treating a bunch of trolls as a legitimate news source. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Post and its Obama/Clinton pals and maybe even some deep state psy-ops shop turned out to be the real brains behind PropOrNot. To use the lingo of the fraudsters wrapped up in the fakery inside of the fiction, a lot of "folks" have gotten themselves pwned. And when they're inevitably exposed by name in all their McCarthyesque complicity, they can always plead ignorance, despite being the allegedly smartest experts in the room. Unaccountability is the cornerstone of their business model.

Just wait. The powerful people who hope to benefit from this ham-fisted intimidation campaign will end up blaming a bunch of unpaid volunteers (or FBI or CIA operatives pretending to be a bunch of goofy unpaid volunteers) with a website. Mistakes were made. Whoever could have imagined that such all-American untruthiness was going on in this Establishment?