Sirius the dog star is still high in the sky. It's so bright, in fact, that on cloudy days you supposedly can even see it with the naked eye. At times it can even outshine the sun itself.
But in American End-Times, nobody but nobody outshines Reality Star Donald Trump. Not even reality starlet Omarosa Manigault Newman, despite her daily drip-drip-drip of goodies to a hungry press corps. So what better time for him to call another woman a dog, and what better time for the media to bay like hounds at the latest manufactured outrage when they're not salivating for the latest treat? The Dog Days of Summer have taken on a whole new meaning thanks to Donald Trump. He has made this typically slow news time of year sizzle like a virtual burning planet.
"Dog Days are approaching; you must, therefore, make both hay and haste
while the Sun shines, for when old Sirius takes command of the weather,
he is such an unsteady, crazy dog, there is no dependence upon him."
So said the Old Farmers Almanac way back in 1817. As usual, the folk prognosticators got it totally wrong, given that Crazy Dog Trump is as reliable a juicy news story as a piece of raw steak. The media are drawn to the bait as magnetically as Trump's twittery jittery thumbs are drawn to his i-phone every morning, coinciding with the dawn rising of Sirius. When the woman in question - the ubiquitous Omarosa - also happens to be Black, the dog insult becomes even worse, especially when it's juxtaposed with the White House's passive-aggressive admission that a tape likely exists of Trump using the N Word. Fetch the smelling salts. In other barely-reported, and thus less shock-intensive news, Roman Catholic priests were found to have abused over a thousand children in the past several decades in just one state, Pennsylvania.
At least 30 people died in a bridge collapse in Genoa, Italy after its crumbling state had been an obvious scandal for months, if not years. Heads will not roll, although right wing officials are boldly calling for "resignations." You see, it was all the fault of the E.U. and not the fault of elected right wing officials. A bus full of Yemeni children was blown to smithereens by an American bomb. The murders of brown-skinned children are deemed by the corporate media to be less offensive and newsworthy than the latest president uttering racist slurs on tape. (both Nixon and LBJ were caught on tape uttering racist slurs, but not until they were safely dead.) A complicit bipartisan Congress just gifted the "insane" racist president almost a trillion more dollars with which to bomb more busloads of children. And that money will need to be replenished in another year. It's no wonder that lawmakers gave him the nearly blank check months before the bill actually came due. It's no wonder that they gave this allegedly crazy dog even more money for more bombs and planes and troops than he even asked them for. But don't feel depressed or angry! Because the "most diverse group of candidates" in US history has just won a handful of primary elections. And that means that the American establishment is still reliably and liberally focused on identity politics rather than on class politics and anti-war politics. The choice of the second Muslim woman to run for a seat in Congress on a progressive Democratic platform has, judging from all the self-celebratory liberal press coverage, served the dual purpose of absolving the Democratic Party of its own guilt in the killings of millions of Muslims throughout the world by American bombs and guns and the recent nondebatable funding of the US Imperium's continuing death and destruction.
It's the neoliberal way. Elevate a precious few members of historically marginalized and oppressed racial, gender, religious and ethnic groups to positions of prestige, and call it a victory rather than the whitewashing that it truly is.
Have you noticed that more and more corporate media pundits are paying some positive attention to socialism these days? If they can't beat such attractive upstarts as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, they might as well at least pretend to join them in the pre-midterms interim. There'll be plenty of time after November to curb both their enthusiasm and ours. Color me skeptical, but when neoliberal scribes Paul Krugman and Michael Tomasky write pro-socialist op-eds in the New York Times on the very same day it does tend to send my bullshit detection radar into high alert. Krugman even took a break from his European bicycle tour vacation to wax rhapsodic about Denmark's social welfare state. It seems like only yesterday when he was waxing funereal about Bernie Sanders's call for single payer health care and free higher education. O.K., so it was more than a year ago, but time flies when millions of desperate people are logically thinking that their time is running out. Tomasky, editor of the centrist journal "Democracy" and a columnist for the Clinton-supporting DailyBeast (Chelsea Clinton sits on its board of directors) is not so much enthusiastic about socialism as he is worried that capitalistic greed is creating too much socialistic enthusiasm in the great unwashed masses.
So if you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society. So is a solution to a national drug crisis in which 115 people die every day, as well as a lot of other problems that the capitalism of our era has simply ignored.
I have mixed feelings about this socialism boomlet. It has yet to prove itself politically viable in general elections outside a handful of areas, and by 2021 we could wake up and see that it’s been a disaster for Democrats.
Mind you, Tomasky mainly has the interests of the plutocrats at heart. His column is an appeal to their alleged altruism and understanding of the lesser people and by no means a list of remedies to ameliorate record inequality. He doesn't go so far as to agitate for single payer health insurance, a living wage, increased Social Security benefits, a federal jobs guarantee or new taxes to fund affordable housing. He only asks that wealthy "thought leaders" care, or more accurately, pretend to care. Otherwise too many leftists might get elected and take away their perks. Nevertheless, both he and Krugman are being widely praised for saying such pretty, inclusive words. They are good soldiers who will do whatever it takes to get disaffected Democrats to the polls in November. Meanwhile, since I wanted to find out if socialism is getting even more popular among disaffected young people, I Googled "millennials/socialism/polls" to get some numbers. Surprisingly or not surprisingly, the very first entry in the Google search results was from a site calling itself "Victims of Communism.Org." It wants to warn struggling, indebted young people about their deluded thinking. If they persist in wanting guaranteed medical care and other nice things, they might end up in a Stalinesque gulag. Or to be really realistic about it, Maduro's Venezuela!
Unfortunately, Americans are as ignorant of the developing situation in socialist Venezuela as they are of the definition of socialism itself. Six out of every ten Americans surveyed were wholly unfamiliar with Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and the economic crisis and human rights abuses that have occurred under his rule. So, 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the majority of the largest generational cohort in America show great enthusiasm for socialism while completely failing to correctly identify its definition when asked or examine its consequences. It gets worse. Seven in ten Americans drastically underestimate the number of people killed at the hands of communist regimes over the last century. This is unsurprising, given the fact that half of all Millennials say they have never heard of Mao Zedong, a man whose policies killed nearly 60 million people, making him the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century.
It goes on to equate the neo-Nazi provocateurs at Charlottesville with the anti-fascist protesters "with hammer and sickle flags" despite the fact that the anti-fascists are not members of the Communist Party. A click on the miniscule link to "Leadership" reveals that, unsurprisingly, the people in charge of Victims of Communism.Org hail from conservative think tanks, the finance industry and the security state. The executive director, Marion Smith, is a Heritage Foundation alumnus. Look for his re-education campaign on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox and other echo-chamber outlets of the corporate propaganda consortium. Chairman of the Board is Lee Edwards, also of the Heritage Foundation, who cut his own anti-socialistic teeth as director of communications for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.
Not that the Victims of Communism organization is totally Republican, of course. Since "bipartisan" is establishment-speak for "noble, altruistic and honest," there is even a congressional Victims of Communism Caucus to more ably represent the interests of unfettered capitalism. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and Dennis Lipinski (D-IL) joined with their GOP colleagues in urging EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to boycott the unveiling of a statue of Karl Marx (a gift from China) in his hometown of Trier, Germany this past May in honor of his 200th birthday. No matter that Marxism was co-opted by such despots as Joseph Stalin in order to do some truly evil things. According to the official US corporate bipartisan consensus, Karl Marx personally was and is responsible for all manner of global evil.
To his credit, Juncker not only ignored the US politicians and right-wing hecklers, he publicly derided them in his speech at the statue's dedication:
Mr Juncker said: "Anyone would do well in remembering Marx because remembering and understanding are part of securing the future. "Without memory and thought, without understanding memory, there will not be much for the future. "Marx isn't responsible for all the atrocities his alleged heirs have to answer for. "One has to understand Karl Marx from the context of his time and not have prejudices based on hindsight, these judgments shouldn't exist". He went onto discuss Marx's influence on the European Union, saying that Marx's philosophy taught Europeans that it was the “task of our time” to improve social rights.
No word on whether the Bipartisan moralizers back in the USA will demand that Marx's books be banned as well. But no matter. In the American Land of the Free, Marx is rarely, if ever, taught in institutions of higher learning. And most important of all, curious learners anxious to learn about socialism and polls and young people always have the Google to set them on the right-wing path. Google, you might remember, has not only given the reactionary website "Victims of Communism" the top spot as a result of this query, it has actively suppressed such leftist groups as the World Socialist Website from its results pages. Here are the other top hits to the query "socialism/polls/millennials" on Google's front page of results: "Majority of Millennials Want to Live In Socialist, Communist or Fascist Nation Rather Than Under Capitalism" (Washington Times) According to the lead, "this troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society." Sound familiar? Maybe it's because the source of this scare-mongering piece is none other than the above mentioned Marion Smith of the Heritage Foundation. For a guy so concerned about education, he certainly has a parallel agenda of the destruction of public education in the United States. He also has an addiction to false equivalency, the way he equates socialism with fascism. Third-ranked on the Google search results page is a Chicago Tribune piece titled "Why Are Millennials So Hot on Socialism?" (Hint: they are woefully uneducated, not knowing such uncomfortable factoids as "the forcible removal of ghetto children" from their parents in Denmark... so they can go to school for 25 hours per week!) Also too, the American millennials who favor socialism are the same depraved individuals who believe in birth control and extramarital sex. It's only until you get halfway down the Google search results page that you get to read more objective and relatively unbiased articles about young people and socialism, which are largely centered around the upset primary victory of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Still, as CNN reported on the recent polling, millennials still like capitalism and free enterprise right along with their newfound enthusiasm for socialism. So all is not lost. As long as there's Google to supplant critical thinking skills and the deep study of history, there's life in the old Oligarchy yet. So the corporate media will keep their fingers crossed until such time as they can get back to business after the November midterms. They'll keep inviting reactionary shills like Marion Smith on their air to keep the conversation balanced, the concern for the poor as shallow and perfunctory as possible, and the capitalistic cancer in fake remission even as it grows and multiplies under all the concern-controlling and co-optation and snake-oil treatment.
So today I got my marching orders to vacate the flooded, incipiently moldy premises as of 3 p.m. Sunday so that Servpro can get on with making it like it never even happened. Granted, this was pretty short notice on the part of the landlord, who had given me a date of a week from now to check into the hotel. But professionals that they hopefully are, Servpro found themselves unexpectedly ahead of schedule. So no blogging, except maybe posting a few links, for the next week or so. I am not lugging my heavy equipment into exile, because it will be hard enough lugging my self and my clothes, my meds and my toothbrush into exile. Before starting packing, though, I did comment tonight on Maureen Dowd's piece, which ever so originally compares Trump to a mob boss. Naturally, she just happened to run into Robert De Niro at a party a while ago, and whenever one has the opportunity to drop a famous name in one's New York Times column, one must never waste it. And one must also coyly hint while one is at it that one was the direct inspiration for DeNiro's F-bomb-laced diatribe at the Tony awards.
My published comment:
I found myself lately wishing that the Trump Show would end just like "The Sopranos" did: with an abrupt blackout and no chance of a revival or spinoff.
And then I realized that such a blackout might spell not only the end of his organized crime spree, but of all of us. This guy has already created whole hellscape of collateral damage and misery. Will there be any turning back?
He threatens to nuke countries he doesn't like. He quit the Paris Climate accords. His nominee to head the Superfund program has made a career out of getting the polluters and poisoners of the earth off the legal hook, at great public expense. His "health" consiglieres are already plotting a mob hit on single payer health care. The thug heading HUD wants to triple the rents of the poorest tenants, while Trump's slumlord son-in-law Jared sues them for every last dime. His moll Betsy DeVos came not to oversee public education, but to destroy it.
Trump brags about GDP growth without admitting that such growth is a cancer which kills all but the richest of the ethically challenged rich. Wages continue to stagnate even in this "booming" economy.
His pathological lack of discipline and a business model built entirely of deceit are the mirror image of late-stage capitalism's pursuit of limitless wealth and power - planet and people be damned.
Not just Trump, but the whole crooked system must come down and be replaced by a moral system of government, aka democratic socialism. Our lives depend on it.
Not to brag or drop names or anything, but the president who first reminded me of a Tony Soprano-style mafioso godfather was none other than Barack Obama. There was that time, for example, when his Secret Service thugs kidnapped Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2012 for attending his debate with Mitt Romney. They literally handcuffed her to a metal folding chair at an undisclosed location before letting her off with a stern warning. And who can forget Democratic Senator Dick Durbin deflecting blame from Mob Boss Obama of the Austerian Cartel right onto greedy senior citizens who, through their selfish desires for a barely bearable retirement via Social Security, are robbing those precious future generations of any future at all? "Social Security is gonna run out of money in 20 years," Durbin trumpily lied on corporate-sponsored TV in 2013.
"The Baby Boom generation is gonna blow away our future. We don't wanna see that happen," Dapper Dick declaimed demagogically in his best Don style.
And then there was the Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate crime cartel, whose dastardly plans for total world domination hinged entirely upon Obama-style secrecy, stealth and lies. You might remember those hellish times circa 2015-16 when even congress critters were not permitted to examine draft copies of this planned mega-hit on ordinary people without the presence of armed guards to make sure they didn't make or steal copies. It goes on and on. Just a cursory glance through my Obama-era blog-posts provides a smorgasbord of tasty reasons why Trump won and the Democrats lost - not just the presidency, of course, but about 1,000 federal and state seats. Here, for example, are excerpts from one typical right-wing speech that Obama gave in 2013, doubtlessly inspiring legions of disgusted Democrats to stay the hell home the following mid-term election year, in what turned out to be the lowest voter turnout year in modern American history:
We’ll need Democrats to question old assumptions, be willing to redesign or get rid of programs that no longer work, and embrace changes to cherished priorities so that they work better in this new age.
(That was the standard, centrist, dog-whistled attack on Social Security and Medicare, in case you didn't know.)
We’ve come a long way since I first took office. As a country, we’re older and we’re wiser. And as long as Congress doesn’t manufacture another crisis – as long as we don’t shut down the government just as the economy is getting traction, or risk a U.S. default over paying bills we’ve already racked up – we can probably muddle along without taking bold action. Our economy will grow, though slower than it should; new businesses will form, and unemployment will keep ticking down. Just by virtue of our size and our natural resources and the talent of our people, America will remain a world power, and the majority of us will figure out how to get by.
With $100 million in book, speech and media deals in just little over a year, I think it's safe to say that Obama has figured out how to get by as ably as the majority of One Percenters.... or is it the .001 Percenters? Math was never my strong suit.
I also think it's safe to say that the reason that millions of Obama voters either stayed home again in 2016, or voted for Donald Trump out of sheer disgust and desperation, was that not only had they not figured out how to get by, but they realized how royally they'd been screwed by The One.
Political pro though he may be, it's like his eight years of Hope and Change never even happened. Serving the bottom 90% was just never part of his deal.
One of the upstairs tenants in my apartment building had the bright idea of hanging a sweatshirt on one of the sprinkler heads in their unit. As a result there was a massive flood the likes of which this complex has never seen. Two or three apartments were destroyed along with all their contents. Several more (including mine) were discovered to have severe interior wall damage which will require a partial gutting. Luckily none of our own personal property was destroyed. So the management is putting up the most severely affected tenants in a hotel as repairs get underway, with the rest of us "triaged" according to extent of damage. Meanwhile, the constant sound of jackhammers (or what sounds just like jackhammers) makes reading, research and writing next to impossible during the daylight hours. At night there is the sound of industrial fans and dehumidifying and other equipment, which travels through to the apartments, like mine, which are still technically habitable. Even with air conditioning it feels like a sauna in here! It could be so much worse, of course, and I really can't complain. The building management is paying full rehousing costs for those affected, as well as abating our rent. The hotel they've booked for the evacuees is one of the more decent ones in town. The people who suffered the complete and devastating losses all had renters' insurance, thank goodness. One of them had just moved in a week ago. We still haven't gotten a firm date on when we have to leave our own apartment, but their best guess is in the next 10 days to two weeks. We also don't know how long it will be before we can move back in. A week and maybe two is their best estimate.
Since I do all of my blogging from my desktop computer, which I definitely will not be lugging with me, writing on the blog will be put on hold for what could be close to a month. At most I'll try to post small items now and again while I await my "marching orders." I'll still be able to moderate and post comments from my phone during my exile, though, so if anybody would like to hold down the fort while I'm gone, please do so! Your excellent commentary is always welcome, both in the best of times and the worst of times. Ciao for now.
"He felt constantly unappreciated and harassed by others, was frequently suspicious of many of those around him... vindictive, seething with unfocused hostility. (He had) a permanent sense of insecurity and frustration... leading to frequently bungling attempts at compensation... and a need to show the world who was boss." (He filled his White House with) "big-bellied good-natured guys who saw Washington as a chance to make useful contacts and were anxious to get what they could for themselves out of the experience. (It was) the era of the moocher. The place was full of Wimpys who could be had for a hamburger." Those are pretty standard critiques of Donald J. Trump, right? They are repeated so often that most people with a pulse can recite them like a litany. The only problem is that those observations were written about Harry S Truman. The first snippet is by Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby, and the second one was written by legendary journalist I.F. Stone. You might not know it from all the historical whitewashing of Truman, particularly after the one-man Broadway hit show based on the "Plain Speaking" bestseller by Merle Miller. But this guy was a pretty dangerous human being. If you think that the recent Democratic Party and Deep State-instigated RussiaGate campaign is over the top hysterical, if you likewise think that Trump is a paranoid nut case for the ages, relax. Because "Give Em Hell Harry" actually makes The Donald look like a wimp. It was Harry Truman who, upon first arriving in the Oval Office after FDR's death, beat Trump to the punch by about 70 years when he boasted: "I'll be as tough as the toughest!" But in an ironic twist in light of today's politics, the people with whom Truman wanted to get tough were not the "fake news" media, Muslims, and Latino immigrants. It was those damned Russians.
So, exhibiting some pretty amazing party solidarity despite the alleged intra-party "divisiveness," Democrats have taken a tip straight out of Crazy Harry's playbook and repurposed Russophobia in their own desperate Hail Mary pass of an electoral tactic. It's really the only thing their billionaire handlers on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the deep thinkers within the "defense" industry-controlled Deep State will allow them to do. Even "socialist" Bernie Sanders is fully on board the RussiaGate Express. Trump, bad as he surely is, has nothing on Truman. Harry was so crazy that he dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after the United States has already as much as defeated Japan -- because he wanted to "send a message" to Stalin that the United States was going to be in charge of the world from thereon in! For sheer psychopathy, this act of mass murder certainly surpasses Trump's apocalyptic canoodling with Putin, or, in his most recent brazen display of toughness, his threatening all-caps tweet to Iran.
Trump contemptuously, yet weakly, threw rolls of paper towels at Puerto Ricans. The US under Truman actually threw lethal bombs at them, when they started making demands for independence and were thus in violation of his edict criminalizing dissent. It seemed that the Russians were meddling and "sowing discord" even in Puerto Rico in the late 40s and early 50s. According to media reports, they continue doing so to this very day!
The Truman Doctrine divided the world neatly into the realms of good (USA! USA!USA! ) and evil (RussiaRussiaRussia!) in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Truman combined the worst aspects of modern-day Trumpian paranoid authoritarianism with scare-mongering over a crisis, manufactured explicitly to sell a war-weary public on the Cold War, and later, on the hot proxy war (er, "police action") against the Chinese/Russian coalition in Korea. Truman was so crazy, he not only publicly threatened North Korea with nukes, he dispatched atom bomb-bearing B-29s to the US base at Guam to prepare for an imminent attack. It turned out to be a bluff, obviously. Conventional weapons were successfully killing millions of North Korean civilians anyway. And back at home in the Land of the Free, one of the new President Truman's first orders of business in the sales pitch for American global hegemony was signing an executive order called the Employees Loyalty Program, which authorized investigations into the beliefs and associations of all federal employees. If a worker was accused of disloyalty, he or she did not have the opportunity to defend him or herself. And in some Kafkaesque cases, they were not even made aware of the charges. The Truman administration ultimately compiled a list of 197 "subversive organizations" - left-wing political groups, peace groups, relief organizations and labor unions, membership in any of which was grounds for immediate investigations, and usually, firings. Not willing to be co-opted or usurped by a Democrat, though, the Republican reactionaries in Congress quickly dubbed Truman a weakling and upped the ante, calling for even more purges and investigations. More than 300 new laws against "subversive activities" were passed at the federal, state and local levels, with some states declaring membership in the Communist Party to be a felony. The State Department issued a Trump-like travel ban in 1952, both for suspects entering the US and citizens leaving the Western Hemisphere. Even Supreme Court Justice William O.Douglas was denied a passport because of his own criticism of American foreign policy. (It wasn't until 1964 that the travel ban against people whom the New York Times derided as "Reds" in its headline was finally overturned and declared unconstitutional.) Joe McCarthy, aided by future Trump mentor Roy Cohn, saw his own opening and pounced when his off-the-cuff remark at a GOP women's luncheon about a list of 200-odd government spies got some unexpected press. He has since become the all-powerful lone bad guy in the historical revisionism of that era, not least because he was not only crazy, he was an alcoholic right-winger right out of central casting who made the mistake of going after the Pentagon and the State Department. If Chuck Schumer had been around, he could have told Joe that the Intelligence Community has six ways from Sunday of getting back at you. In any event, the propaganda and fear-mongering during the early Cold War years were highly effective. Seventy-seven percent of polled Americans wanted suspected Communists to be stripped of their citizenship and 51 percent favored imprisoning them. "Nevertheless," writes Griffin Fariello, "these statistics may well reflect the shallow roots of the Red Scare, measuring only the uncritical ease of which many Americans take on the attitudes evinced by politicians and the media. For when asked, 'What kind of things do you worry about most?,' 80 percent responded in terms of personal or family problems, with the largest bloc expressing concern over business and economic problems."
Millions of people have suffered and died in the interests of one or both US war parties and the capitalistic predators who own them. Millions of Americans have been displaying their susceptibility to relentless war propaganda for generations.
No matter that when the truth about the lies finally comes out, people have long since moved on to believing in the next Big Lie. Fool them once, fool them a hundred times. It wasn't until 1978 that Truman adviser Clark Clifford admitted to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein that the administration had always been fully aware that there was never any "loyalty problem" at all, or even a Communist threat. "He (Truman) thought it was a lot of baloney.... It was a political problem.... He'd gotten a terrible clobbering in 1946 in the congressional elections. We gave a good deal of thought of how to respond. We had a presidential campaign ahead of us, and here was a great issue, so he set up this whole kind of machinery."
When Truman was exposed as a manipulative liar nearly 40 years after the fact, he was already five years dead. Nobody really cared. The old crimes of the nation's leaders had been sucked down the memory hole and effectively erased from "the narrative." Fast-forward to 2018. The recently clobbered corporate Democrats in thrall to wealthy donors and hellishly aligned with the grotesquely named "Intelligence Community" are locked in an oligarchic power struggle with a blustery paranoid president and a party which has long relied on racism and economic resentment and voter suppression and gerrymandering to win elections. But instead of countering this ugliness and mass suffering with a campaign for a new New Deal, the inheritors of Harry Truman's own expedient paranoid style are embracing Hellish Harry with a vengeance and throwing FDR right under the bus. Because to Third Way neoliberal Democrats, the New Deal can never be dead enough to suit them.
A new generation of Russophobes were either not alive when Harry Truman was pulling the same kinds of destructive political stunts that both the Trump administration and the Duopoly are playing at today, or they don't bother reading any actual history of that truly scary time. Or maybe they do know, and they just don't care, because it's their party right or wrong. Everything they need to know is right there in the Times, the Post, on CNN and MSNBC. The media-political complex is having a ridiculously easy time ginning up Russophobia in the masses, making it the central, deflective campaign platform for the 2018 midterms, and probably even for the 2020 presidential race. Maybe they're envisioning their Truman zombie of a presidential nominee gleefully holding up a newspaper with the headline "Trump Beats----------."
And then, at long last, they can finally purge their long national nightmarish memory of this:
The CIA, born as a rogue presidential army in the Truman years, is now a virtual fourth branch of government, to which all good Americans, true men and true women, are expected to pledge allegiance or risk being branded as at best, useful Kremlin idiots, or at worst, traitors. If you want to know the truth, look no further than the history section of your local library. It is simply chock full of facts and valuable clues and historical precedents and dots to connect. But best be quick about it, because Godzillionaire Jeff Bezos might be hatching a fresh hell of a plan to render your friendly neighborhood libraries obsolete, replacing them with the Book Emporium of Amazonia - in order to "save taxpayers money". Or so Forbes reported, before a Twitter outcry deflated the trial balloon, and the whole article simply disappeared without explanation. You still can read the cached version here, because despite the legacy of Truman, the lords of capital still haven't quite gotten their purging skills in total order.
What do Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth have in common (besides, that is, being the carefully manufactured celebrity public images which mask and protect the private pursuit of power and wealth by neoliberal capitalism at the public's expense)? They have perfected the fine art of pissing all over Donald Trump without ever having to unzip their lips and soil themselves by mentioning his name. That would just be too, too untoward. Obama gave what's being praised (by the corporate media) as a momentous put-down of The Donald at a speech he had to travel all the way to South Africa to give, ostensibly in honor of the late Nelson Mandela. Lilibet was even more circumspect. As she stiff upper-lipped her way through the odious chore of meeting and greeting Trump last week, she wore a giant brooch given to her by Barack and Michelle Obama. She couldn't have stabbed Trump in the ass more effectively if she'd unpinned the magical amulet and stabbed him in the ass with it. She is the Merriest Wife of Windsor evah, or at least in the past half-millennium.
It's a tiny secret anti-Trump club of elites out there, folks, and you ain't in it. All you regular people can do is experience your daily Five Minutes of Hate in online comment boards when you're not feeling the vicarious outrage along with such Russophobic cable news stars as Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper. The coded anti-Trump snootiness possibly reached an apogee of hilariousness in the pages of The Guardian:
Casual royal observers such as myself barely noticed the Queen’s fashion
choices during Trump’s visit, because we were too busy cringing at
Trump’s behaviour around her. Whether you give a fig about the royals or
not – and I come very much from the “no fig” end of the spectrum –
watching Trump galumph around in front of her, get in her way and
generally act as if she wasn’t even there was, just on a human level,
throw-up-on-your-own-shoes nauseating. She’s a 92-year-old woman, show
her some respect, you giant Oompa-Loompa! But, of course, expecting
thoughtfulness from a man who, earlier this year, was photographed holding an umbrella over his own precious head leaving his young son exposed to the elements, brings to mind words such as “blood” and “stone”.
And the Queen, wisely, appeared to expect none either, because it turns
out she was sending us all coded messages via the medium of her
brooches. Yes, her brooches – read on and bow down in awe, James Bond.
Twitter user @SamuraiKnitter has pointed out
that on the first day of the Trump visit, the Queen wore a simple green
brooch that was given to her by the Obamas to signify their friendship.
On the second day, she wore a brooch given to her by Canada, a country
with which Trump is less than pleased at the moment (also, it was in the
shape of a snowflake, a classic Trump term for people who disagree with
him.) And, for the last day, she chose a brooch she wore to the funeral
of her father, so not one associated with happiness and joy. Queen’s
brooches: 3. Trump: 0.
Barack Obama sported no royal jewelry with which to broadcast his own elite disdain for the Human Dorito, but he still retains his silver tongue and his vocabulary of gold. And thus he broached the topic. Unlike other mere liberal mortals, currently frothing at the mouth in an inchoate group frenzy of Treasonous Traitor Terror Tirades, though, Obama was able to add to the epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome by seeming to tamp it down with his calm, cool, dispassionate, "coded" rhetoric.
Trump's Tweets: 0. Obama's Speech: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. You'd think he was a computer geek with all the praise he's getting from the media about his "coded" message to Those In The Know, a message they imagine totally bypassed the thick skulls out there in Deploraville, who wouldn't know the meaning of "ascendant strongman politics" and nuance if their asses depended on it. As the New York Times reported,
Mr. Obama seemed to to take direct aim at Mr. Trump over his administration’s policies and his propensity for exaggerations and falsehoods.
He said he was stunned how the notion of objective truth was now up for
debate and how politicians make up facts and stand by baseless claims
even after they are proved wrong.
“We
see the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re
caught in a lie and they just double down and lie some more,” he said.
“Look, let me say: Politicians have always lied, but it used to be that
if you caught them lying, they’d be like, ‘Ah, man.’”
Unlike Trump, Obama has a refined sense of humor. When he was caught out in his epic "if you like your health plan, you can keep it" lie about the Affordable Care Act, for example, his aides were able to importune the Obama-friendly media into treating it like a huge joke, with the uninsured and underinsured public as the giant punchline. And with stunning book, speech and Netflix deals worth least $100 million in his first post-presidential year alone, Obama has very much to be amused about when he's not giving his very serious (with many a knowing grin) coded speeches.
The Art of Coded Trump-Pissing, Complete With Urinal-Inspired Podium
Those smugly In The Know just can't resist juxtaposing Obama's legendary arcane brilliance with Trump's latest Tweet, in which he not only misspelled "colusion" but he so deranged that he thinks he is immune from the Trump Derangement Syndrome bug going around. He is so deranged that he is even, as Politico reports, "walking back his walk-back on Russia interference."
President Donald Trump on Wednesday returned to a defiant posture,
insisting his deeply controversial meeting with Russian President
Vladimir Putin will prove to be a great success “in the long run” and
complaining that his critics are suffering from “Trump Derangement
Syndrome.” One day after issuing a rare mea culpa — in which Trump claimed he
meant to say there’s no reason to believe it “wouldn’t” have been Russia
that meddled in the U.S. election — Trump appeared to be walking back
his walk-back.
“While the NATO meeting in Brussels was an acknowledged triumph,
with billions of dollars more being put up by member countries at a
faster pace, the meeting with Russia may prove to be, in the long run,
an even greater success. Many positive things will come out of that
meeting” Trump tweeted.
Since I recently cancelled my ripoff cable TV service, I was late watching the TrumPutin Armageddon press conference that has Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow and the New York Times writhing in such conniption fits of outrage. And you know what? I didn't find the con at all out of the ordinary. Leaders of state preen for the cameras and fawn all over one another - check. Corporate media ask questions about the Golden Showers Dossier and other click-baity things, and said leaders react with disdain. Check.
I was, like, oh man,where is the beef? Where's the charred Mar-a-Lago sirloin? Where's the Strogonoff with sour cream and mushrooms? It was painfully obvious that these media personalities were so pumped before the fact of The Summit From Hell that they had their disgusted talking points all lined up to recite for the cameras the minute that Trump and Putin left the stage
But lo and behold. It is now two whole days since the Summit, and the capitalistic world is still spinning. Amazon Prime deliveries are still running right on schedule. The pay is still too damned low and the rent is still too damned high. The United States still has between 800 and a thousand military bases all around the world, and Russia still has a very scary grand total of Nine. NATO still exists. So does NAFTA, despite all of Trump's deranged trade war rhetoric.
You know what is really bothering me? I'm discovering that I am developing more sympathy and empathy for Trump voters (dare I say even for Trump himself?) than I am able to even remotely identify with the hysterical McCarthyite liberals of the Democratic Party, who seem to be yearning for World War III by actually attacking the Trump regime from the right. No wonder James Comey is urging everybody to vote Democratic. They've got Intelligence on their side, and I don't mean in a good way.
Treason is in the air. If you hate everything that Trump stands for, but still agree with him that #Russiagate is a fraud*, then it naturally follows that you are just as much a traitor as he allegedly is. Hysteria is in the air. Trump betrayed the United States by meeting with Vladimir Putin, who did attack us, is attacking us, and will continue to attack us. If you don't believe it, then you weren't paying attention when actor, Hillary Clinton supporter and #MeToo critic Morgan Freeman made the big announcement last year. He informed the nation that we are at war with Russia, and he urged Congress and the Intelligence agencies to act. And they listened. Because Morgan Freeman is so much better at playing President than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is such a lousy actor, in fact, that he committed the cardinal sin of presidents. He actually criticized what is hideously euphemized by its media enablers as the Intelligence Community. He has made this critique before, of course, mainly on Twitter, but on Monday he did it with Vlad the Impaler standing right there at his side.
Elite heads proceeded to explode.
James Clapper, the former NSA chief who lied to Congress about spying on everybody, and John Brennan, the former CIA chief who couldn't even get confirmed in Obama's first term because he helped implement Bush's torture program, are under attack by the Treasonous Traitorous Trump (see the New York Times'sCharles Blow, who got the whole treasonous media ball rolling with his pre-TrumPutin Summit column.) Since the punishment in the United State for high treason is death, look for the next phase in the media hysteria to be a debate over how to execute Donald Trump. The more passionate pundits will probably opt for bringing back the electric chair, while the liberal humanitarian interventionists will suggest nitrogen gas. Of course I'm kidding. They don't really want to put Trump on trial for high treason. They don't want to gift him with such a ratings bonanza, especially since his martyrdom would include a stirring speech with the theme "I regret that I only have one life to give for My Company."
They just want to weaken him a bit while spreading their scare stories and raising donor money for the mid-terms. They'd prefer he lose a second term to a centrist Democrat, aka moderate Republican, who will be loyal to the unaccountable rogue police state and spy agencies whose own main function is enabling corporate global plunder and protecting the oligarchs against the restive global rabble. The elite media-political complex wants somebody who will stay mum on all the meddling in foreign elections which the United States has done, is doing, and will continue to do until the American Empire collapses under the weight of its own hubris and greed. Trump is acting too much like an outside critic of Empire and not enough like its discreet marketer. His idea of the presidency is being the star of his own reality show. To impress one another and portray themselves as righteous to the rest of the world, therefore, our elite Thought Leaders must pretend to despise him, despite the mammoth tax cuts he recently gifted to the wealthiest among them. They want the rest of the world to forget the record hundreds of billions of dollars they just gifted right back to Trump's own war machine by a very compliant and corrupt Congress.
This recent Russophobic hysteria is very much an internal war between the two political right wing factions of the ruling class: the Dollarcrats and the Reprivatans. Since the latter abhor regular people by rewarding the private interests of capital at every opportunity, they should just remove the "public" part of their moniker and exhibit a little honesty for a change. Ditto for the Dems. The people, or Demos, have become too utterly subservient to the big money gilding the Big Tent into a virtual gated community to have their name co-opted any longer.
Totalitarianism is alive and well in the Land of the Free. The FBI and the CIA and the NSA have usurped what used to be the purview of the independent press and have become an all-powerful and highly weaponized fourth branch of government.
Why else would a Congress pretending to despise Trump just confirm a known torturer, "Bloody Gina" Haspel, to head the CIA at Donald Trump's own specific and very personal behest? They love Trump, but they just can't admit it in public.
* Update. Never mind. Trump has officially caved. He is not willing to die, not even for his brand, his dynasty, or his company:
======================================= I can barely stand any more to look at the propaganda tool of the "Deep State" which the New York Times has unabashedly (rather than heretofore stealthily) become - but I have nonetheless submitted a few more comments in recent days. Readers who express even the slightest skepticism in the comment threads about the inherent goodness and honesty of the Police/Surveillance State are becoming fewer and farther between. Propaganda absolutely does work, even upon the minds of otherwise very intelligent people. Maureen Dowd, who used to write such fun and shallow pieces on Trump's antics, is now deadly serious about the Great Orange Evil and his puppet master Vlad. Ever the name-dropper, she shares that she and some other celebrity pundits once had dinner with Putin at the 21 Club and were so put off by his icy cold stare and his sanguine attitude toward a Russian submarine disaster that they lost their appetite for all that fine service and overpriced food. So not to be outdone by the hysteria and overwrought angst of her corporate media cohort, Dowd has finally seen the careerist light. She bloviates:
Trump hugging Putin even as Putin stabs at our democracy is an incomprehensible mystery.
Flummoxed
and craven Republicans scramble to go along with a president who has
turned the traditional heroes and villains of the G.O.P. topsy-turvy,
berating our European allies, NATO, the N.F.L., the F.B.I. and the
C.I.A., and canoodling with the mendacious and scheming Russians.
On
the eve of the Helsinki summit, which Trump has arranged as a very
intime pas de deux, it is still befuddling and alarming to watch him
kowtow to Putin.
When you are as disloyal to football as you are to the police state and the permanent war machine, any lingering doubts about your patriotism will get flushed right down the toilet.
So how shocking that we all woke up on this Summit morning-after, still breathing and the sun still shining, and Amazon Prime still delivering. The nuclear war that the Neocons and the Liberal Interventionists are hankering for will have to wait for another time, especially since the one lone anti-nuke protester at the Summit was summarily ejected from the room by our very honorable patriots, aka police state strongmen. My (not highly recommended) published response to Dowd:
Trump is a master of spectacle. Since the show's the thing, he doesn't
care as long as he's still #1 at the box office and on Twitter.
Pathological lying? Meh. As long as he gets the wall-to-wall coverage
from our pathologically consolidated media, he's a winner in his own
stunted little mind.
A gaslighter for the ages, he saturates the
news cycle till it's as flat and stale as yesterday's pancake. Still,
the manic over-coverage of the TrumPutin Apocalypse does serve to
distract our attention from our own day-to-day problems, such as lack of
a living wage, lack of savings, unaffordable rents, unaffordable health
care, and so much student debt that people are actually dying before
they're able to pay it all back.
So while we blame Russia for
hacking our "democracy," the culprits much closer to home can remain
free, screwing the body politic with the immunity and impunity to which
they've become accustomed.
Trump is the symptom, not the core problem. The scary thing is that
unless our politics is replaced by some actual representative democracy,
our future presidents will not only be like Trump, they'll be smarter
than Trump.
Meanwhile, the Blimp above Parliament is sadly
something we're not allowed to see above US seats of power, given that
the moneyed interests running this show have barricaded themselves below
their no-fly zones and behind their armed luxury fortresses.
So down with the Ugly, and up with the beauty of social democracy. Oh, and happy Bastille Day!
Now on to Paul Krugman, who thankfully didn't go full Russophobe himself because he already had a column in the can about the nasty Republicans - and again, it's only the nasty Republicans - waging a war on poor people. The newest gimmick in this endless war is declaring that since the war on poverty was such a success, who needs anti-poverty programs any more anyway? Certainly not the rich.
Sadly though, neither poor people nor Krugman's own narrow views on poverty are trending topics on the Times today, thanks to the Bromance Armageddon Hysteria completely hogging the front page. So, fewer readers than normal weighed in with comments on something so mundane as massive record poverty in the richest country on earth. Outrage can only go so far on any given day and on any given topic, after all.
Anyway, here's my own published submission:
The "official" way the US defines poverty paints a falsely rosy picture.
According to current standards, only individuals earning less than
about $11,000 are deemed poor, while a household of four must fall below
$24,000 to qualify for the honor. Thus, "only" about 12% of the US
population are that badly off.
A more accurate metric is the
Supplementary Poverty Measure, which takes into account the rising costs
of rent, food, clothing and utilities. In actuality, at least a third
of the population, or 110 million people, can be considered poor or
nearly poor. They are: 51.9 percent of children under the age of 18 40.7 percent of adults between the ages of 18-64 42.5 percent of elderly 45 percent of women and girls 33.9 percent of Whites. 60.3 percent of Blacks. 65.1 percent of Latinos. 41.1 percent of Asians.
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's Poor
People's March on Washington, which he didn't live to lead. But now we
have the Poor People's Campaign, which has been staging protests (with
many arrests) all over the country as well as a major rally in D.C. a
few weeks ago. There has been little to no corporate media coverage of
this movement of. by and for the poor.
If you're wondering why that is, the operative word is "corporate."
Trump isn't the only corrupt entity looking a humanitarian crisis in the face and callously pretending it doesn't exist.
m