You’ll Just Die: I Can Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time!

A friend whom I’ll call Larry was first chastised, then denounced, then told “I want nothing more to do with you” on Facebook for the crime of posting a critical fact about Joe Biden last week.

Here’s why some of us are not going along with the curiously widespread notion that we must suspend our use of reason for the next six months. Believe it or not, tying ourselves to chairs with muzzles placed over our mouths is actually not necessary. Even more shocking news flash: it won’t help defeat Trump in the next election.

Ordering us to do so is not only offensive, but also says tons about the politics of these Democrat-worshiping bullies. In the counter-factual world of Bernie as the nominee, would any of these self-righteous hall monitors restrain themselves about his shortcomings or adopt a monkish silence? On the contrary, they would be screaming from the rooftops about how Sanders MUST move to the right to capture all those wary voters who want to keep paying their health insurance premiums and think Israeli annexation of other people’s land is just the thing.

No, they would never accept an imposed vow of silence for themselves but now puff up in holiness to remind us unruly schoolchildren that there is ONE GOAL that must occupy our collective mind and spirit, which is to send the Evil One packing. Suggesting that Biden is not the ideal standard-bearer to lead us into battle is thus both sacrilege and sedition.

I suspect that a very ample majority, close to 100 percent in fact, of people who post political news of a leftish tendency will pull the lever for stumbling and incoherent Joe, unless they live in a state like mine where it won’t matter, in which case WTF are you talking about? I’m pretty sure Larry is aware of the dangers to peace, the planet, and our polity represented by the raging nut job in the White House.

However, neither Larry nor I plan to go into hibernation for the rest of 2020 and in fact have a few ideas about how to contribute to reversing the dangerous trends accelerated—but hardly invented—by DJT. Oddly, or not, what Mr Biden will actually do after January 2021 never seems to enter the conversation. Why not?

Why is all this finger-wagging about what we must, haveta, gotta do when voting occurs 161 days from now so annoyingly short-sighted? Because it implies and sometimes explicitly states that All Will Be Well once we effect a change of occupancy in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It accuses skeptics of the heretical belief that something deeper than one individual’s strange sociopathology is bringing us woe. It demands the right to go back to sleep.

Most importantly of all, it demands passivity from now until November.

To take just one example: those of us who actively campaigned for an end to the insurance company death panels standing between us and medical care have a major problem with Joe B. While an ample majority of the country agrees that Wall Street has no business in the provision of healthcare, Biden is beholden to his greedy backers in the rentier class who don’t want to give up their gold-bearing goose. He’s quite explicit about it, assuring one and all that nothing will change, despite the new, pandemic-stimulated attention to the dysfunctional current system. Biden, like Trump, has no interest in a radical overhaul, and Biden, like Trump, lines up with the 1 percenters who are profiting handily while people die and go bankrupt.

Does that make Biden just as bad as Trump? Does that mean it’s irrelevant who wins in November? Actually, some of us are capable of holding two thoughts in our minds simultaneously: Trump is awful, and healthcare delivery has to be changed. Imagine that. And no, we should most definitely NOT keep quiet about it.

But pointing out the alignment of the Democrat mainstream with corporate greed will dissuade low-information voters from hoofing it over to the polls later this year, right? If so, those who decided that Biden was our guy better do something about it other than demanding that the rest of us STFU. Sounds like you have some persuading to do, so perhaps start by communicating with the Biden campaign that he’d better start making more attractive promises instead of announcing that his goal is to turn back the clock to the Obama-normal era.

And incidentally, telling Larry and me to clam up isn’t likely to inhibit the Trump campaign from saying a lot of nasty things about Biden, like for example, how closely tied he is to the Wall Street elite that’s ruining people’s lives. Is that hypocritical gaslighting? Yes. And? Trump ran to the left against Hillary in many policy areas, and Biden has the same vulnerability. Why not repeat a winning strategy?

Biden is a disastrous choice, but the Dem machine made it and now has to live with it. Those who went with the more-of-the-same wing are saddled with a glaringly weak figure who may well win by default because the other guy’s Oz curtain finally has been shredded. A government led by a President Biden will face grave crises on multiple fronts, and he’d better improve on his past record if he doesn’t plan to pave the way for the next Trump, an equally reactionary post-Trumpian figure who will be less deranged and thus more dangerous, knowing as he/she/they will, just how far the American people will line up behind a demagogue.

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Yes, Trump is a wannabe tyrant, but Flynn was set up

The FBI, the CIA, and officials in the Obama White House engaged in serious misconduct in the run-up to and the carrying out of the Russiagate investigation. Neither Trump’s demented tweets nor his open disdain for legality change that.

Media outlets that trumpeted Russiagate for three years and still have not engaged in self-criticism over it are now in a tizzy over Attorney General Barr’s instruction to withdraw the charges against Flynn for lying to the FBI. That’s probably judicial overreach, but it pales in comparison with the overreach involved in targeting Flynn in the first place.

Flynn copped to lying to the FBI about his discussions with the Russian ambassador in the days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Flynn was to be Trump’s top security official, so the conversation itself was unremarkable. The FBI made a big deal out of it because of other suggestions that the Trump campaign was engaged in a quid pro quo collusion with Vladimir Putin to get himself elected since obviously actually getting Americans to vote for Trump voluntarily was inconceivable, right? Except that a lot of them did, even people who don’t watch broadcasts on RT.

Before exploring what Flynn said that was deemed untruthful, let’s recall that the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 started as an attempt by one party in a presidential election to spy on the other side. As Trump complains in his usual calm and restrained fashion, that’s exactly what the Obama-led intelligence agencies did to him. Now for several years, we’ve been told that the FBI had reasonable grounds to suspect something fishy was occurring in Trumpworld. That’s pretty easy to believe because everything about Trumpworld is fishy. But to justify a counterintelligence operation targeting Trump campaign officials, even former ones, in the midst of an election, the FBI had to have pretty solid evidence. Did they?

We now know that the notorious Steele dossier including the discredited pee-tape tale, none of which the FBI could independently verify, was used to obtain warrants to snoop on the Trump campaign. Steele himself peddled its contents to a variety of journalists, most of whom wouldn’t go near it. Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, however, did publish a story that the FBI was looking into its allegations. Remember that name.

Eli Lake at Commentary explains:

In the wake of the Republican National Convention in July 2016, the FBI launched “Crossfire Hurricane,” a probe of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Over the course of a few months, the bureau sent informants and undercover agents to record five of Trump’s campaign advisers surreptitiously through conversations those informants and undercover agents set up on the FBI’s behalf.

Most significant, at the FBI’s request, was the behavior of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISC granted four successive warrants to eavesdrop electronically on the communications of a low-level Trump foreign-policy adviser named Carter Page. This was a highly unusual step in a matter involving a U.S. citizen because Page was working for the presidential campaign of the party out of power.

To get those warrants approved, the FBI submitted uncorroborated opposition research [the Steele dossier] that had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign without fully informing the court about the origins of the information.

. . . In its application for the FISA warrant against Page, the FBI used Isikoff’s Yahoo story as verification of Steele’s reporting. “Which means that the cloud over Trump’s presidency was the product of journalists and G-men using themselves to confirm a falsehood.

This is exactly how Dick Cheney used Judith Miller to get his phony tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on the front page of the New York Times. That led to the debacle of war. Russiagate threatens to engulf us once again in a new way.

Back to Flynn’s FBI interview: we learned last week through FBI internal emails that the agents sent to talk to him—which he naively thought was a friendly call—pondered whether they should “get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” Using a time-honored police tactic, they pretended that the conversation was just a routine chat and did not suggest to Flynn that he was suspected of any crime. Anyone who watches police shows knows that this is a really good way to get yourself charged with one. (N.B. Never talk to the cops without a lawyer, especially if you are innocent.)

Flynn wasn’t in office yet, so he should have been more cautious in discussing Trump’s desires with the Russians, and perhaps he thought the FBI shouldn’t know exactly how much he ventured into policy details on the call while another Administration was still in power. Apparently, he forgot that the FBI guys would be sitting on the transcripts of exactly what he said to the Russian ambassador, which, as a former high-ranking snoop himself, he had to assume. But Flynn never suspected he was being set up.

It’s remarkable how eager erstwhile liberals are to applaud the FBI’s sneaky entrapment tactics given that agency’s long history of repression of social movements. For example, the agency loves to find developmentally challenged immigrants or hapless Muslim believers and manipulate them into thinking they’re staging a terrorist attack. They get to blow open the “plot” and attract lots of great coverage about how they’re protecting America while ignoring the white-collar crime wave that is bankrupting us.

If there is ever a serious mass movement against the direction the country is taking, we can rest assured that the FBI will be front and center infiltrating it, populating it with agents provocateurs to promote violent acts and snare militants, compiling dossiers on supposedly protected political activities, and generally doing the ruling elite’s dirty work. We should not defend them now as one of their dirty tricks comes apart, even if the victim was a reactionary nutcase from Trumpville.

Meanwhile, the potential damage of the Russiagate fantasy and gross bending of the laws by official actors is as yet incalculable. An FBI lawyer stands accused of altering a document used to renew the FISA warrants and is now himself facing the possibility of criminal charges. More investigations are ongoing, one of which has subpoena power to dig around inside the CIA as well as the FBI, both arenas where Trump would love to find dirt.

The Providence Journal in blue-state Rhode Island called the Flynn prosecution a “frame-up” and said Barr was right to drop the charges. Those winds may be shifting. In fact, we may face the prospect of high-profile indictments of elements of the “Deep State” coming out right about the time Americans have to decide between Trump and Biden. Good luck focusing the voters’ minds on Trumps shortcomings then. Instead of railing about Russiagate, Trump may discover it was the best thing that ever happened to him.

There is no opposition to Trump

There is hostility, which is not the same thing.

Opposition implies a critical analysis and an alternative program, that is, an examination of what is being done wrong, why this is so, and what should change. On all three points, the loudest non-Trump voices offer confusion, distraction, and hypocrisy, not leadership around which a movement could cohere.

What is wrong?

A thought experiment: summarize in a brief statement where the Democrat mainstream/Biden campaign thinks Trump and his “team” are going off the rails. If you are finding this hard to do, you’re not alone. There is no consistent message coming from The Opposition that embodies a fundamental attack on Trumpism. Sniping around the edges doesn't count.

Biden most recently attacked Trump for throwing a “temper tantrum” and for failing to expand Obamacare eligibility. He also said Trump was acting like a king. (Obama signing a kill list every Tuesday wasn’t? But I digress.) Elizabeth Warren released a coronavirus plan (of course) and criticized the Trumpians for “a process plagued by confusion, inconsistency, and potential political interference.”

A group of House Democrats put forward their own proposal for a post-COVID economy that “would ask each state to submit a plan on how to reopen businesses and schools in consultation with the Department of Health and Human Services — not just the president’s pulpit.” Nancy Pelosi insisted that her bipartisan “oversight” committee will protect the $2 trillion bailout fund already in Trump’s hands from waste, fraud, and abuse even though House Republicans already say they may turn down the invitation. And just for good measure, Trump announced when he signed the massive financing package Congress sent him that he would swat away carping Nancy like an annoying gnat.

The Democrats’ statements and gestures express distaste for Trump’s grandstanding and dismay at his incompetence. They point out his administration’s lack of planning, administrative disarray, and sloppiness. That’s it—no objection to how Trump is exploiting the crisis to enrich the rentier class and protect corporate looters. That’s because, generally speaking, those are the Democrats’ friends, too.

If Biden/Pelosi/Warren had reservations about what Trump was going to do with the unprecedented pile of money he asked for, they had one chance to impose their conditions: before giving it to him. They didn’t. (Neither did Bernie Sanders although he doesn’t control the House majority.)

Yes, Mitch McConnell and Trump would have had a fit and dashed over to Fox News to accuse the Democrats of wrecking the economy. A real opposition would have said, “And?” Trump needed the bailout desperately; that was their chance to exercise a veto if they had dared. Post hoc complaints are window-dressing to bamboozle naïve voters into thinking that Democrats in Congress were stopping Trump from doing his worst.

For a while, Dems also slammed Trump as an appalling sexual predator, but lo and behold! now that Biden himself has been credibly accused of sexual assault, the indignant feminism so prominently on display during the primaries is nowhere to be seen. Elizabeth Warren, recently the righteous defender of Womanhood, is now so untroubled by the Tara Reade story that she just penned a joint op-ed with Sleepy Joe in the Miami Herald. The fact that Biden employs former Harvey Weinstein flack Anita Dunn attracts no comment from the woke brigades. Corruption, another of Trump's weak spots, could hardly bother a party on the verge of crowning someone with Biden's record of nepotism and corporate shilling.

Why is Trump a disaster?

This is a question Democrats cannot answer because they are complicit. Trump is a disaster because he has accelerated the process of pushing the proceeds of the world’s largest economy further into the hands of the tiny financier elite while they strip what is left of the nation’s productive capacity. He continues the bipartisan policy of rewarding fat-cat crooks with more government welfare. Democrats did the same when they were in office, a bit less obviously, so they have no problem with the process and scarcely criticize it. Yes, they occasionally emit pious rumblings about the sufferings of the downtrodden classes that they still pretend to represent. But they prefer to court suburban Republican voters, convinced that they might be peeled away from Trump, and so avoid unseemly references to social class. The open mockery of Bernie and his supporters is a reflection of this turn to the right and courtship of the professional/managerial class (PMC) voters who object to Trump culturally and stylistically.

By ceding the most dangerous and most obvious of Trump’s many shortcomings, Democrats are left with objections of an aesthetic nature, criticisms of his dumb statements, vainglorious lies, and disrespect of traditions. They can’t answer his nasty mockery because they fear him and his threats to retaliate, and their base is not working people but rather the permanent war-making apparatus, the snooper complex, and the increasingly beleaguered civil service ranks where Trump is carrying out massive purges. Because Democrats don’t represent the majority of average workers and would rather jump off cliffs than call upon them to rise up in protest, they are helpless in the face of the ongoing Trumpian onslaught.

What should change?

Democrat alternatives to current policies are lame, late, and lackluster, and sometimes they are even more conservative than Trump’s. They respond to the massive loss of employer-based health insurance with calls to subsidize the insurance companies rather than pay medical costs directly. Biden answered Trump’s China-baiting over the mishandling of the coronavirus catastrophe with the criticism that he’s a late-comer to the bashing party. The Democrats still can’t admit to the nothingburger of Russiagate and insist that the evil Russkies are plotting to help Trump again in 2020 while the evidence of old-fashioned Jim Crow vote-rigging piles up everywhere. They pretend that the huge blank check they handed to sleazy Trump operatives can somehow be monitored so that it doesn’t enrich the president’s friends but did nothing to ensure that it doesn’t. They plead for assistance to soon-to-be-bankrupt states and cities after giving up any leverage they had to guarantee it. Trump then openly threatens to play favorites and punish states whose governors criticize him.

In short, the Democrat opposition is much more rhetorical than real. Sadly, even Bernie’s consistent criticism falls flat these days as he loyally signs on to the party consensus while trying to push additions and improvements. AOC is a lone voice in the wilderness daring to cast the occasional no vote.

What’s left are endangered and desperate people daring to walk off the job and appealing to their peers for support. We the people are on our own and must find our own way forward without waiting for leadership that doesn’t exist. By shedding illusions to the contrary, we open up new possibilities.

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