Anyway, all of that pales in comparison, in my opinion, to Trump’s deadly, daily lies regarding the pandemic. He literally has the blood of nearly 200,000 Americans on his hands. We already knew Trump was putting his reelection and the Stock Market above human lives. But now we also know, from the recordings, that he knew it was deadly serious. He can’t pretend anymore that he was just fighting “elite libtards” on the science, owning them, etc. He knew. He knew had bad this shit was gonna be back in January, at least, and he said so to Woodward.

This also tracks with other stuff we knew before these bombshells. That Trump and others in his administration blocked a plan to fight the pandemic, because they decided this was just a “Blue State” problem, and they could blame Blue State governors, etc. As long as it wouldn’t impact Trump’s base, directly, they could scapegoat their way to victory in November — or so they believed. And the revelation that Trump knew how deadly this is also casts more (obscenely ugly) light on his decision to hold a half dozen indoor rallies in the last few months.

He doesn’t care how many Americans die, as long as he maintains power. And we know he doesn’t care about how many furriners die. Kids in cages. Migrants in cages, period, despite Covid-19. Fomenting a coup in Venezuela. Leaving the Kurds defenseless to be slaughtered by the Turks, cuz he and Erdogan had a phone conversation, etc. Bragging to Woodward about this amazing new Nuke “he” had developed, etc. etc . . . which tracks with his earlier public statements that he would use the Bomb, even on Europe, if necessary.

Not to mention his anti-Climate policies.

Worst. President. Evah.

You’re probably right.

But isn’t it interesting that this seems okay with right-wing spokespersons? More grading on the curve stuff. They likely even gain “cred” for being scruffy, if it’s in the right(wing) way. Old cap, beard, camouflage gear, an AR-15 and whatnot. If they look like hunters, I suppose — of animals or people — they seem “authentic,” not scary, to all too many an American.

But leftists, especially “anarchists”? It’s grab all the children and hide under the beds.

Which makes me also think, especially now, of the tragic conflation of “anarchist” with “bomb-thrower,” which seems deeply ingrained in our culture. Centuries of anarchist philosophy — as you know — counters that stereotype. But who listens or cares?

PA Ram wrote:

I live in a city in the outskirts of the Philly suburbs and I can tell you that if anyone here has any enthusiasm for Joe Biden at all,it isn’t showing. This city is mostly Latino and the Democrats are failing somewhat miserably in engaging them at all.

No one I know of is voting FOR Biden. If they vote at all it is AGAINST Trump. This seems like a strategy we have seen before by the Democrats. They are very anti-populist and are running on a strategy of conveying competence vs. chaos. That’s great. But will it be enough to motivate people to vote?

Biden isn’t the kind of person to get excited about — and that’s not just in terms of his policies. A lot of that has to do with his own lackluster personality. Watching him on TV makes me think he wishes he had never gotten into this.

We humans are, in many ways, far less complicated than we like to believe, and far more prone to being manipulated. Or flat out sold. All kinds of studies show this. Even supposedly sophisticated wine connoisseurs will choose a glass of wine labelled $91 over the one labelled $10, even though they both came from the same bottle.

Manufactured realities, fictions, symbols, and signs. Who does better with the creation and sales of these false-fields. That’s key. The Dems have never been good at sales, and they keep choosing bad salespersons to top their tickets.

They’ve cleared the field the last two times for the least effective salesperson, instead of letting the guy with the best agenda (Sanders) head the ticket, etc. etc.

IMO, a clear majority of Americans will vote against Trump, not necessarily for Biden, if they’re able to. If Trump and his fellow right-wing goons let them vote.

Zooey wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Taibbi basically admits that “policy” is irrelevant when it comes to Trump.

Well…Message, then. The Democrats only message seems to be “Not Trump.”

Biden has a slogan, apparently written by Melania, that I do not even understand: Build Back Better. WTF does that even mean?

There is no promise to increase people’s well-being through wages or healthcare or whatever. They’re not Trump.

I must be overly ornery today. Gotta get to my favorite mountain places tomorrow and fine some semblance of peace.

Anyway, how about this? The Dems do both? Push an agenda that will actually improve lives and help save the planet, and go after Trump when needed?

He keeps adding fuel to the fire:

Trump targets ‘white privilege’ training as ‘anti-American’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ anti-racism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

OMB director Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil.”

He’s really working overtime for the Nazi vote.

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

I think his main point is that making the election about Trump is a losing strategy. It should be about policy.

I agree that Biden should be crushing Trump in the polls. .

==================

Well, maybe in Portugal. Or Finland.

Not in Corporate-Capitalism-Central.

The System made too many Red-State versions of Idiots and Blue-State versions of idiots.

How could there be a landslide by either side on the planet-of-the-apes?

w
v

WV,

That’s damn fine thinking there. Scary, too.

. . . This video may segue into an all too appropriate advertisement/reminder at the end. A nice “corrective” to this might be “The Boys,” on Amazon, if you haven’t seen it. Deals with the commodification of superheroes. Of course, it’s on a service owned by the richest man in the world, at least officially ($200 billion now. Got that way by wiping out millions of jobs and paying slave wages.

As Norman Mailer said in the pages of Dissent, back in the 1950s:

Capitalism follows you everywhere.

Zooey wrote:

I think his main point is that making the election about Trump is a losing strategy. It should be about policy.

I agree that Biden should be crushing Trump in the polls. Trump’s term has been one policy failure after another, and he has done NOTHING to help the people whose dissatisfaction with their marginalization led to his election. If you make the campaign about policies, then that failure is emphasized. When you make it about Trump, you are making it about showbiz, a terrain that favors bombast.

I am starting to see Trump stuff pop up on vehicles now. (I haven’t seen a single Biden). And a common Trump sticker/sign is “Trump 2020: Make liberals cry again.”

And I think, actually, that that is pretty much the core of Trump’s appeal to a lot of people. And I think if the Democrats let the election be about culture war, they are more likely to lose. IMO, they ought to be saying, “Your jobs didn’t come back. Health care hasn’t been fixed. The Swamp has been added to, not drained. His family has literally made hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves, and you are right where you were four years ago.”

Of course, it would be helpful if they had a plan to do something about wages and job security and healthcare, but they don’t. So maybe that’s why they’re taking their chances on amping up the people who hate Trump.

Taibbi basically admits that “policy” is irrelevant when it comes to Trump. But he doesn’t seem to draw the logical inference from that and extend it to politics/voters in general. Trump won because he was able to easily sell a crap sandwich to his base, and actually make his voters love that crap sandwich. The Dems are terrible at that. They can’t even sell edible stuff.

With few exceptions, and for decades now, the Dems have been terrible at sales. They seem incapable of staying on message, projecting confidence, strength or certainty in their own agenda, and rarely show anything approaching a unified front. And the MSM amplifies these weaknesses and divisions constantly. They get a lot of clicks from said stories.

It would be awesome if the Dems countered with at least social democratic/Bernie-style policy platforms, but none of that would matter without sales prowess, which they lack. Conversely, of course, if they actually were as good at sales as Trump is, they could sell a far more ambitious slate, with far better results, well to the left of Sanders. The kind we (here) would love, etc.

Again, they can’t even sell centrism, except to that trickle of ex-Republicans who aren’t a big enough voting bloc to matter.

IMO, without decent salespersons, they need to make this about Trump. But all in, for the jugular, take the gloves off.

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

I’m not sure this blog post belongs here, but..
—-

In Donald Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham last week, he talked about the “shadow people” he believes lurk behind Joe Biden:
INGRAHAM: Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials?
TRUMP: People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows.

Fifteen years ago, the Fox News personality was likely to be the one pushing the conspiratorial envelope. Glenn Beck playing with rubber frogs while railing about assassination plots or spinning elaborate tales connecting Barack Obama to both Hitler and Stalin represented the outward edge of crazy in mainstream discourse.

Today the Fox anchor is the voice of restraint, pleading with the President of the United States to stay on planet earth while cameras roll:

INGRAHAM: What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory.

TRUMP: No, people that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets…

We’ve been living with Trump for so long, we’ve gotten out of the habit of asking the basic questions we normally ask, when a famous person says something odd. What is he thinking? Is he being serious? …

=================

Well see, this is where i part company with a Lot of people, including Taibbi, who i like as you know.

I dont think there is anything weird about Trump’s comment. I dont think its crazy-conspiratorial. I think its intelligent-conspiratorial.

There ARE mega-rich-corporate weasels behind Biden. As there were with Obama, and Clinton, and Reagan, and Bush, and on and on. There’s actually plenty of quotes about this BY past Presidents going all the way back to Jefferson.

There’s always the Politician-Front-Man, and then there’s the Money-People behind the scenes. Why does Taibbi think thats crazy-conspiratorial?

Isnt it also true about Trump? I dunno. Trump’s a billionaire-Narcissist-Ass-Clown. So, ironically, he may be the first President its NOT true of. I dunno.

This is all a minor point, but its just a thing with me. I hate it when MSM-types or Taibbi-types act like ALL talk of shadow-government-power is crazy talk. I wanna tell them grow up. Of COURSE there’s mega-money people in the shadows. Duh.

w
v

WV,

The “shadow people” is in reference to supposed hordes of “antifa” helping Biden. It comes from a Facebook rumor in June that was debunked, about seven people on a plane, all dressed in black, apparently headed to Portland to stir up riots. Nearly three months later, Trump brings it up again, trying to sell it as “new.”

Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he’s perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like “fascist” and “authoritarian,” nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he’d leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger.

The elite misread of Trump is egregious because he’s an easily familiar type to the rest of America. We’re a sales culture and Trump is a salesman. Moreover he’s not just any salesman; he might be the greatest salesman ever, considering the quality of the product, i.e. himself. He’s up to his eyes in balls, and the parts of the brain that hold most people back from selling schlock online degrees or tchotchkes door-to-door are absent. He has no shame, will say anything, and experiences morality the way the rest of us deal with indigestion.

Ironically, the above tells me that Taibbi bought into Trump’s sales pitch, while thinking he sees through it all.

I’ve been saying (from the getgo) Trump is all about sales, too, and that Politics in general is. But Taibbi falls off the Logic Train in thinking that totalitarians in the past haven’t been great at sales too, or that it actually matters that someone like Trump has the attention span of a gnat. He has his own teams. He has a massive government bureaucracy underneath him, with ginormous powers attached.

Trump, himself, may actually do little beyond watching TV, tweeting, and screaming at his subordinates, and doesn’t need to do much of anything beyond being the face his fascist base adores. Taibbi must have been asleep the day they invented Phones, Radio, TV, Computers, the Internet, Editing, etc. In the age of Digital Mass Communication and Digitized Fordism, Trump doesn’t need an attention span. He has staff surrounding him who never sleep.

“They call it ‘delegating authority.'”

In short, a president without an attention span, a buffoon, a huckster, a grifter, an idiot, can implement fascism too. Taibbi is incredibly naive to think this isn’t possible, or to think it requires some kind of genius planner at the helm.

IMO,

It boils down to this. Trump and his handlers have mastered the Art of Bullshit. And it helps them greatly that Trump has absolutely no shame, no morals, no ethics, and no principles, so he’s fine with lying, conning and bullshitting all day long. He’s fine with just making shit up and sticking with the shit he’s made up, relentlessly. He basically can outlast and exhaust Americans and the system via his relentlessness, and the GOP sees this and protects him, with rare deviations.

His handlers have the perfect (empty) vessel for this. A true sociopath, Trump will say and do anything to push his alternative universe, to get what he wants, and he virtually never backs down. It’s beyond obvious that he doesn’t care how many people die in the process.

All too many Americans react positively to unified leadership that does not waver in the face of criticism, reality, evidence. A plurality of Americans seem to actually admire this in a demagogue. The projection of confidence either fools them entirely or makes them feel they can live vicariously through that projection. They join Team Bullshit, knowingly, unknowingly, etc.

But this spell isn’t permanent. Dubya, for instance, while not in the same class of sociopath as Trump, bullshitted his way into war, and held the vast majority of Republicans spellbound for nearly eight years. Then they turned on him, finally.

This will happen to Trump, too, if he loses in November. We’ll see his “base” shrink from roughly 40% to single digits over time, and countless numbers of righties will become Peters and thrice deny him.

But if he wins . . . it’s truly Katy bar the door, and American Fascism, mainstreamed.

Just in case:

I’m not trying to argue against charity and the social safety net under current conditions, by any means. They’re absolutely necessary, though I’d prefer a far greater emphasis on the latter — an expansion of the Commons and general support. I’m just saying that we wouldn’t need them if we replaced capitalism with economic democracy and sanity, localized, sustainable, cooperative, egalitarian production and distribution of necessities, etc.

Have always liked this quote from Achebe:

“While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

That’s good, Zooey. And spot on.

Not everything we need, not all the work we need done, will ever be profitable for the few, and under the cancerous rule(s) of capitalism, that means all kinds of things are perennially left undone. Matters of life and death are left undone. Millions die, literally, because of this.

More than two billion people have no access to functional sanitation, for example. Why? Because it’s not profitable for the few to provide that to the many. More than two billion people also lack access to safe water. Again, it’s not profitable for the few to provide it, so it doesn’t happen. And food? More than a billion humans go hungry each year. This is happening while the rich nations of this earth routinely throw out nearly half of what we buy.

(Hope Jahren says, in her The Story of More, that we already produce more than enough food to feed everyone on earth. Everyone. But the capitalist system isn’t set up to provide for need. It’s set up to make money for the few.)

Which leads to this aspect of capitalism as well: It’s massively inefficient, when it comes to providing for our needs. On the way to the dinner table, 40% of produce is lost in some way, spoils, is dumped to increase prices. Growing a pound of beef takes seven pounds or more of grain, etc. A bottle of beer takes roughly six bottles of water, and so on. All of this waste, all of this pollution, in the service of making billionaires and paupers.

It’s obscene.

wv wrote:

Hakim is a smart young man. I agree with him on this (and many things),
but i also agree with R.Wolff. I think co-ops can be flawed and they can be restricted by all the surrounding shit-storm of Capitalism — but so what. They are still better than nothing. Better than nothing is…better…than nothing.
Even if co ops dont ‘lead to socialism’ — so what.

I agree with you on that. Love Wolff’s take on WSDEs and Co-Ops. I’m definitely not in the All or Nothing camp. Take every step we can to try to make things better, here and now — including reforms within the capitalist system.

My thing is that we shouldn’t stop with just the amelioration of capitalism’s worst effects. That shouldn’t be our end goal, IMO. Keep pushing and pushing until we can replace it entirely. In fact, I think the very process of strong reforms can make that eventual replacement much easier, and far less likely to require any force or coercion. And I’m in always gonna be in the non-violent, democratic change camp.

I know that’s gonna take a lot of time, and I won’t live to see it happen. But it’s worth the battle.

I’m not seeing these things as at all in opposition:

Being appalled that a kid gets to carry an AR-15 down the street, and being appalled that the police protected him, worked with him and other right-wing lunatics against peaceful protesters.

To me, the logical and obvious reaction is to see them as part of greater (ugly, deadly) whole that props up, supports and literally weaponizes white supremacy in America. In fact, America’s radically permissive gun policies protect and enable white supremacists more than any other group — in conjunction with police forces they’ve infiltrated — and no other portion of the populace utilizes those policies to a greater degree. And they repeatedly tell us why they stockpile weapons, and the record tells us they’ve followed through on their beliefs/threats/paranoid delusions.

Again, it’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

Trump has far, far less support than people think.

First off, most of his support comes via the Republican Party. As in, folks who follow the Red Team wherever it goes. Any Republican president would have, at this moment in time, at least as much support as Trump, and likely more if he or she weren’t such an obvious Nazi asshole (I suspect most Red Teamers would prefer quieter, less conspicuous Nazi assholes).

Remember that Bush had the same kind of diehard support right up until the end of his eight years. For the GOP faithful of that time, if you weren’t for him, you were against Amerika!! If you so much as said you were ashamed of being from the same state, your entire career was ruined and you got death threats (The Dixie Chicks).

Trump benefits a great deal from mass amnesia, which he provokes through endless gaslighting. His entire life he’s been “faking it until he makes it.” If he truly were so popular, why did he receive just 26% of the electorate’s vote last time, losing to perhaps the worst, most unpopular candidate the Dems have ever run? Why are his disapproval numbers consistently in the high 50s to low 60s? The way some talk about him, one would think those numbers would be at least below 50%.

Again, his support is very, very thin, and primarily cuz Red Teamers vote Red Team. Oh, and there are more Blue Teamers than Red Teamers in America. It’s a matter of voter turnout/voter suppression.

_____

I guarantee this: When Trump loses, it will take less than two years total for people to go full-on Peter and thrice deny him. Red Teamers will act all, “I never liked him. I was always against his racism, blah blah blah.”