Month: July 2018

There has been a lot of nonsense going on this week related to the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump administration’s possible role in co-conspiring with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election. This is mainly due to Rudy Giuliani acting like a maniac, but it’s also because people are focused on tangential issues. Donald Trump cheated on his wife repeatedly and had his lawyer/fixer work like a fevered badger to prevent news of his dalliances from damaging the campaign. That’s deplorable and may involve some campaign finance violations, but Mueller wasn’t interested and passed it off to attorneys in the Southern District of New York.

The other big, big deal this week is the rumor that there was a second (planning) meeting prior to the more famous Trump Tower meeting between the Russians and Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner. Supposedly, Rick Gates and Michael Cohen attended the first meeting and will be available to testify about it. Cohen, in particular, may testify that Trump Sr. was in on the planning. That’s very damning information, if true, but the Trump Tower meeting was small potatoes.

If you want to know what Mueller is actually looking at, go no further than the December 13, 2016 submission in Christopher’s Steele’s dossier.

The reason the special counsel’s office wants Michael Cohen to become a cooperating witness is because they want information about his trip to Prague. Three and a half months ago, McClatchy journalists Peter Stone and Greg Gordon reported the following:

The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the White House. Undercutting Trump’s repeated pronouncements that “there is no evidence of collusion,” it also could ratchet up the stakes if the president tries, as he has intimated he might for months, to order Mueller’s firing.

Stone and Gordon are careful and well-respected reporters. They are certain that they have this information correct, and there’s little reason to doubt them. Naturally, they could be wrong. But I doubt it.

Here’s the meat of their report:

It’s unclear whether Mueller’s investigators also have evidence that Cohen actually met with a prominent Russian – purportedly Konstantin Kosachev, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — in the Czech capital. Kosachev, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of a body of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, also has denied visiting Prague during 2016. Earlier this month, Kosachev was among 24 high-profile Russians hit with stiff U.S. sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s meddling.

But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016 as the ex-spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential. He wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the so-called Schengen Area in which 26 nations operate with open borders. The disclosure still left a puzzle: The sources did not say whether Cohen took a commercial flight or private jet to Europe, and gave no explanation as to why no record of such a trip has surfaced.

The whole ball game involves determining whether the dossier was anywhere close to accurate when it stated that   the hackers were paid jointly by the Kremlin and the Trump campaign and that Cohen had traveled to Prague (accompanied by three colleagues) to discuss, among other things, how to make final payments to the hackers and to facilitate them going to ground, especially in the event that Hillary Clinton won the election.

If Mueller has evidence that Cohen did indeed make a trip to Prague despite all his denials, then he probably can close this case if Cohen agrees to cooperate. And it’s not anything about the Trump Tower meeting or Playboy Playmates that he wants to know.

Presumably, Guiliani understands this, and maybe he is just happy to keep us distracted and off the main trail. But it’s unlikely his antics will amount to a hill of beans in the end.  If Cohen was in Prague, the president will be removed from office.

Do yourself a favor. Go to this link. It will take an eon to load because it contains about five trillion text messages that were hacked off one of Paul Manafort’s daughter’s phone. You’ll want to scroll way, way, way down to 2014-11-12. This is the day one of Manafort’s extramarital affairs came to the attention of his whole family. It’s makes for some compelling reading, to say the least.

Enjoy.

Wisconsin-based reporter John Nichols co-chairs the National Commission for Voter Justice, an organization committed to promoting citizen participation in our elections. He’s had a front row seat at his state’s governor has taken the lead in a national effort to suppress voter turnout, particularly among left-leaning groups and demographics.

Gov. Scott Walker and his cronies have worked hard to tip the balance against competitive elections in Wisconsin — with extreme gerrymandering, restrictive voter ID requirements, schemes to limit early voting, and an assault on the independence and integrity of the former Government Accountability Board.

Walker has emerged as a national leader in the corporate-sponsored push to upend practices and procedures that are designed to make voting easy. This has put the governor and many of his closest allies — including House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Janesville — at odds with Wisconsin’s historic commitment to high-turnout elections.

Not every Wisconsinite Republican has been willing to along:

Former state Senate Majority Leader Dale Schultz broke with the Republican caucus in 2014 on voting rights issues, telling Wisconsin radio hosts Mike Crute and Dominic Salvia: “I am not willing to defend them anymore. I’m just not and I’m embarrassed by this.”

“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics,” explained Schultz, who did not seek re-election that year. “We should be pitching as political parties our ideas for improving things in the future rather than mucking around in the mechanics and making it more confrontational at the voting sites and trying to suppress the vote.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner tried to rectify the situation:

The official biography of one of Wisconsin’s senior Republicans, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, proudly declares: “Throughout his tenure in Congress, Jim has fought to protect the gains made during the civil rights movement. As Judiciary Committee chairman, he introduced the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. After approximately 20 hearings, the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. However, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of this law. After, Jim introduced the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014, a bipartisan, bicameral modernization of the original 1965 law that ensures Americans’ most sacred right is protected.”

Sensenbrenner continues to advocate for the revitalization of the Voting Rights Act — along with Congressional Black Caucus members such as Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore and Georgia Congressman John Lewis.

Sensenbrenner does not have many Republican co-sponsors for his legislation. But he is undaunted. “Ensuring that every eligible voter can cast a ballot without fear, deterrence and prejudice is a basic American right,” he explained several years ago. “I would rather lose my job than suppress votes to keep it.”

But Sensenbrenner has been stymied by his colleagues in the House of Representatives. The Republicans (state and federal) have moved full steam ahead to gain every ounce of advantage they can out of the Holder v. Shelby ruling. Meanwhile, recent Supreme Court rulings have gone even further to help Republicans game elections through racially motivated gerrymanders and voter purges.

Last week, Stanford political science professor Adam Bonica wrote a column for the New York Times that helped explain both why the Republicans are so motivated to mess with people’s voting rights and why the Democrats would be well-advised to fight back as forcefully as possible.

The simplest way of explaining this is that the demographics and voting preferences of the electorate have developed in such a way that higher voter turnout helps the Democrats and hurts the Republicans. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it gives the Republicans a strong motivation to discourage civic engagement and participation, and to go after people’s voting rights and all efforts to make voting easier and more convenient. Second, it makes the Democrats look like they’re being partisan when they promote civic engagement and participation and work to protect people’s voting rights. From the Republicans’ point of view, easier registration, more days of early voting, more voting machines/shorter lines, vote-by-mail, etc., are all partisan efforts to take away their jobs and their majorities. And, the thing is, it’s simply true that they’ll generally do worse if more people vote.

There’s two conflicting values at play here. It’s a seriously dangerous development that one party is so threatened and frankly disadvantaged by voter participation that they (with a major assist from the Supreme Court) are systematically looking to roll back voting rights and reforms. The more the Democrats push back, the less consensus on the basic American value of representative democracy there will be.  Yet, if the Republicans are the only ones willing to use their power to shape electoral law, they will ultimately succeed in their quest to destroy our system of government and the values that underpin it.

That’s why the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly is dedicated to convincing the Democratic Party to take up the banner of civic participation and voting rights. Our editor-in-chief explains the game plan in Winning Is Not Enough and he also discussed it in a The Hill television interview (watch here) yesterday with Krystal Ball. Some of his ideas are echoed in Prof. Bonica’s piece, including statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington DC, and universal vote-by-mail.

At the conclusion of his argument explaining all the ways that Democrats can benefit from higher voter participation, Prof. Bonica offered the following rationalization:

This is not about weaponizing electoral institutions for partisan gain; it is about delivering on the promise of American democracy. The nation is at its best when democracy is on the rise. Many of our most celebrated figures — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez — fought to enfranchise the disenfranchised and left a more inclusive republic as their legacy. Let’s finish what they started.

It’s a genuine problem that things have developed in such a way that “delivering on the promise of American democracy” by encouraging people to participate in our civic life and protecting their right and ability to do so is synonymous with partisan gain for the Democratic Party. But that’s where we are. Fighting to win elections has become fighting to have meaningful elections at all.

I’d argue that young voters will eventually get older and participate at higher levels, and given their strong distaste for the Republican Party, that will wipe away the Republicans’ ability to undermine our democracy. But there’s the rather large matter of the Supreme Court. It is setting up to have a strong conservative majority for the next few decades, and that’s going to mean that this war will not end on favorable terms anytime soon.

What’s certain is that the Democratic Party can’t avoid this fight.

Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, has an editorial is USA Today in which he attributes as much as ninety percent of President Trump’s inexplicable behavior to “sympathetic audience control.” In essence, the president lives largely without any strong grounding in the past or clear anticipation of the near future. Rather, he mostly reacts to whatever situation he finds himself in in the present and behaves based on his perception of friends and foes.

For Mr. Epstein, this function (or malfunction) in Trump’s brain allows him to contradict himself without guilt or guile. Most of the time, he is supposedly lying unconsciously because he doesn’t have access to what he’s said in the past and “lying has no meaning to him.”

There’s more detail about this diagnosis and what it might mean in the article, and I think there’s definitely at least some genuine insight in the piece, but I pretty much lost my patience near the outset.

At a minimum, this argument is terribly incomplete. Trump may have a tendency to make up with people with whom he has quarreled, but he also is a legendary grudge holder. He did not forget how President Obama humiliated him at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011. In fact, there’s a good chance that one of his main motivations for making a run for president was so he could trash Obama from coast to coast.

Trump has an excellent memory for every politician who ever asked him for money (just ask Lindsey Graham) or attended a family wedding (ask the Clintons). He hasn’t forgotten the pledges he made on the campaign trail, including the insane promises that any other politicians would have discarded the second they were elected: like ripping up the Iran Nuclear Deal, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, trashing NATO, and asking Mexico to pay for a border wall).  That last one seems to have gone dormant, but he didn’t give it up lightly.

There are many things that Trump remembers very well, and many ideas that he sticks to with an absurd doggedness.  One thing he very clearly adheres to is a commitment to please Vladimir Putin.  In fact, he is so thorough in this respect that he must be getting more routine help in understanding what Putin wants than he’s getting from his regularly scheduled private meetings with him. But even if someone is telling him what Russia would like to see in Syria, Macedonia, the Korean Peninsula, and the Baltics, it’s certainly never far from his mind that he should not do anything that might displease Russia. And, if he feels like he may have been cornered into giving some offense, he’s sure to find a way to compensate at the very next opportunity.

Trump remembers things just fine, and when he lies he most often knows that he’s lying. It’s true that he has no conscience about this and that lying means so little to him that he has no real voice in his head alerting him to contradictions. He may very well sometimes be unaware that he’s saying the opposite of what he said just fifteen minutes previously, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t realize that what he’s saying is bullshit. It means that one bullshit comment can’t really contradict another bullshit comment because, for him, truthfulness is a worthless practice.

What Trump is most effective at in life is conning people. He’s never much concerned himself with making sure his cons stay secret. Contractors know they haven’t been paid. People who lay down twenty thousand dollars to take a course from Trump University know they have been duped. When the bill comes due, he brings in his lawyers, pays his fines and legal settlements if he must, and moves on to the next scam.

I don’t know what the correct psychological terms are for Trump’s behavior but I consider it an extreme form of narcissism and sociopathy. I think it’s a rather large mistake to think that Trump is a simple-minded person who just likes to please Chuck Schumer or Kim Jong-un or whoever else is in his presence or says something nice about him. He’s a predatory con-artist and every relationship he has is purely transactional.

There’s only one person he won’t sell out at the drop of a hat, and that person is Vladimir Putin. Somehow, in that relationship it was Trump who became the mark.

                            Trump/Giuliani: The Post-Truth Era Is Finally Here. Now!!!

Rudy Giuliani suggests newly released tapes of Cohen and Trump may have been tampered with.

The president’s lawyer previews a new strategy: “What was eliminated? And then you raise that question with every one of these tapes.”

Every one of “these tapes???!!!”

Yup.

Ultimate translation?

Sure:

“Nothing is necessarily true that you do not see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears. Live, not recorded in any way.”

Read on.

I dare ya.
Go ahead.

Line up a battery of “high-level audio technicians.” You know…the kind that will after days of testing swear on a bible that there has been no tampering.

Then Trump’s lawyers will line up another battery of supposed high-level audio technicians. The kind that will after days of testing swear on a bible that there has been serious tampering.

Who ya gonna call?

Ghostbusters?

Even if you do, are you sure your phone call wasn’t redirected to a bunch of Ghostbuster imitators?

Spooky spook spooky, anti-spooks?

Lke dat.

And there you are, back on the leftiness vs. rightiness faux news/tweet circuit.

THE PRESIDENT IS LYING!!!

NO HE IS NOT!!!

And on and on and on and on it goes.

Where it stops, nobody knows.

In fact, nobody even knows where it started!!!

Was it with Nixon and the famous 18.5 minute “tape gap?” Or perhaps tapes that never even showed up?

Like I said…nobody knows.

Not really…the ones that did know are now all dead. Besides, if they didn’t tell you themselves what went down…live…then as Rudy G. says above:

Then you raise that question with every one of these tapes.

And even then…maybe “they” were lying?

Like I said…post-truth like a motherfucker!!!

Was it even earlier?

When “the tapes” “conclusively” proved that there was only one shooter in the JFK assassination. Until of course other tapes didn’t.

Was it the Nixon/JFK debates?

Purposely bad lighting and makeup on Nixon?

Or was it simply an ugly spirit showing through all the makeup in the world?

The so-called “news” says:

You be the judge!!!

But listen to us first!!!!

“Here come da judge!!!” as Flip Wilson used to say. (Pigmeat Markham, actually. But he never successfully passed through the media filter barrier. He was too…true. Too black.)

However…da “judge” is now…on a daily basis…all of us!!!

Judge Judy multiplied by millions.

“He slapped me!!! And then he stole my money!!!”

“No. I didn’t!!!”

And may the most ratings-friendly witness win.

Ratcheted up to potentially apocalyptic proportions.

But…

But…

If all evidence outside of your own live experience is essentially suspect because of possible digital taint?

Then da real judge is the one with the most power.

And who might that be?

Well folks…we gonna find out.

Just sit back and enjoy the show. You got no say in it because…because if you do try to say something that might make a little sense, you will immediately be opposed by other digital forces trying to make other things sound…”sensible.”

Also dupes?

Or maybe pros?

(P)robots, maybe?

Who knows?

Even some of them don’t know.

Not really.

So it goes.

History is written by the winners.

Will it be the Trumpies? Aided of course by “other powers?”

The neocentrist DemRat/RatPub coalition?

Or will the whole ball of media wax melt while the controllers behind the Digital Curtain…the contemporary successor to the Iron Curtain, bet on it…simply prop us up a new false paradigm and then continue to go on about their “business.”

Maybe ol’ Calvin Coolidge wasn’t so dumb after all!!!

Often misquoted as “The business of America is business,” here is a prescient version of the contemporary controller line as uttered by then-Vice President Coolidge.

President Coolidge made his famous remark in an address to the Society of American Newspaper Editors on January 17, 1925 in Washington, D.C.

The speech he gave that day was titled “The Press Under a Free Government.” It focused on the role of the press in free market democracies, like America.

Coolidge noted that the press was far more likely to publish propaganda in autocratic or Socialist countries.

He acknowledged concerns about whether business considerations could affect editorial positions and news reporting in a society like the US. But he pointed out the flip side, saying:

“There does not seem to be cause for alarm in the dual relationship of the press to the public, whereby it is on one side a purveyor of information and opinion and on the other side a purely business enterprise. Rather, it is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences.”

Then Coolidge added his famous quote:

“After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”

Nice.

An early…and quite successful…attempt to either further pull the wool over U.S. citizens’ eyes or just another dupe talking through his hat?

You like potato and I like potahto

You like tomato and I like tomahto

Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

Either way…Edward Bernays and his advertising/propaganda/mind control theories win.

“Let’s call the whole thing off.”

Just what the controllers want!!!

I will say this again:

NEWSTRIKE!!!

MEDIASTRIKE

CULTURESTRIKE!!!

VAYA!!!

They’ve got y’all twisted around their finger.

Their middle finger.

Bet on that as well.

Later…

AG

I am not an expert on how the Department of Justice typically works and there’s nothing typical about having an office of special counsel investigate the president, but it seems to me that Robert Mueller has performed a cunning bit of jujitsu on Donald Trump. Mueller declined to directly investigate Michael Cohen’s role in paying off the president’s mistresses or evidence that Cohen may have committed crimes related to his taxi business. Instead, he passed off what he had learned to prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Something similar happened in the case of suspected Russian spy Maria Butina who was indicted by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Mueller didn’t initiate or execute the searches of Cohen’s or Butina’s properties, and he isn’t going to court in either of their cases.

This seems to have completely confounded Trump and his attack dog Rudy Giuliani. They want to call this all a witch hunt and that’s precisely what they are doing, but their words don’t make any sense.

For example, last week the attorneys with the Southern District of New York called Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, to appear before a grand jury. This is undoubtedly because Michael Cohen told Trump on an audio recording that Weisselberg had advised him on how to set up dummy companies in Delaware to disguise the payments to his mistresses. That tape was seized in a search, but the search had absolutely nothing to do with Mueller.

Yet, Giuliani is saying that Trump is frustrated with Mueller’s team over the subpoena of Weisselberg because they “chase down every alley, then they end up with nothing.” Giuliani says Mueller should stop grasping at straws and produce a report because “enough is enough.”

But Mueller has kept himself one step removed from the Cohen case. He’s also one step, at least, removed from the Butina case. He could get fired tomorrow and it wouldn’t disrupt either of those investigations or associated trials.

At the same time, if either Cohen or Butina want to avoid doing substantial jail time, they’ll likely have to work out some kind of deal with Mueller. I doubt the Southern District will cut Cohen a break for exposing fraud in the New York taxi industry or spilling the beans on a coverup of an adulterous affair or two or six or twelve. They’ll want to know what Michael Cohen was doing in Prague and why he denied traveling there.

Likewise, if Maria Butina wants the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia to go lightly she’ll have to help him roll up a larger spy ring and understand how the National Rifle Association spent Russian money in the 2016 campaign. No plea deal for her will come cheap.

I think Mueller must be getting a kick out of watching people argue about what Trump knew or didn’t know about payments to a Playboy Playmate when clearly that has nothing to do with what Cohen is expected to divulge. The president is attacking Mueller personally now because he’s upset about investigations, but these are investigations that Mueller is not directing. He’s working on Paul Manafort and dozens of other leads, and if Cohen and/or Butina want to come to him and make some proffers, he’ll be happy to hear them out.

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

The Englers end by stepping back and putting momentum-driving organizing in a broader and deeper context of creating and sustaining change over the long haul. They summarize the three main elements of a healthy and powerful culture of change in this way:

   
• “mass mobilizations alter the terms of political debate and create new possibilities for progress;”

   

• “structure-based organizing helps take advantage of this potential and protects against efforts to roll back advances;”

   

• “countercultural communities preserve progressive values, nurturing dissidents who go on to initiate the next waves of revolt.” (pp. 253-54, emphasis added)

They hold up Gandhi as an exemplar of a practitioner and theorist who, in the course of his long career, drew upon and (in his word) experimented with all three approaches in his quest to achieve Indian independence.

“In Gandhi’s method, the Salt March and other campaigns of satyagraha in India produced defining whirlwinds for the cause of independence. Meanwhile, the Indian National Congress, in which Gandhi played important leadership roles, became a critical structure-based mechanism for institutionalization; indeed, it would become the country’s ruling party after the end of the British Raj. Finally, with his prefigurative ‘constructive program,’ Gandhi advocated for a distinctive vision of self-reliant village life, through which he believed Indians could experience true independence and communal unity. He modeled this program by residing communally with others in a succession of ashrams, or intentional communities that melded religion and politics.” (p. 277)

The point is not to live as Gandhi lived. The point is to recognize what he did: that a vibrant, liberating, democratic culture requires a multiplicity of modes and roles.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

This is fascinating on so many levels.

Stuff like this gives me violent fantasies.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Saturday downplayed renewed scrutiny over whether President Trump knew in advance about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election, saying “nobody’s going to be surprised.”

Issa was pressed by Fox News’s Neil Cavuto during an interview on whether Trump could face legal consequences if proof emerges that he knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that was billed to Donald Trump Jr. as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for Trump.

“If he’s proven to have not told the whole truth about the fact that campaigns look for dirt, and if someone offers it, you listen to them, nobody’s going to be surprised,” Issa told Cavuto. “There are some things in politics that you just take for granted.”

It’s okay. I’m going to walk into the woods and blow some shit up.

I’ll feel better then.

I started this post as a reply to esquimaux in my recent post (http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2018/7/27/132017/974) Karma Knows ALL Secrets. And…It ALWAYS Collects Its Debts. Eventually. It grew, so here it is as a standalone.

Esquimaux wrote:

I can’t take the pro-Russia “left” like counterpunch and consortium news and MOA and some of the Intercept writers like Greenwald.

My answer follows.

Read on.

###################################################################
Being anti-RussiaGate is not necessarily the same as being “pro-Russia,” esquimaux. For example, I am not “pro-Russia.” Why? Because I’ve been there and smelled that. I feel sorry for the people of Russia. They’ve been had too, only by a steel-fisted oligarch/spy/dictator. The difference between here and there that I saw a few years ago was as follows:

They…masses of them…know that they’ve been had, and they also know that they can’t do a goddamned thing about it. Plus…if something did happen to derail the oligarchy in charge, the utter economic devastation that followed the fall of the U.S.S.R. is still fresh in people’s minds. They’re pretty much stuck with what they’ve got.

In the U.S.? It’s different. The mainstream U.S. propaganda machine (Also known as “The Governmental Media Complex”) is so much more sophisticated than is Russia’s. It is almost invisible to most Americans, and thus much more effective. Only a small percentage of us consciously reject it. The rest? It’s just one big laughfest/hatefest. Silly news about cute litle kitty kats and and temporary superstars, interspersed with various imprecations hurled at whatever target is assigned to any given organ of that complex.

Hate Republicans!!!

Hate Democrats!!!

Hate minorities!!!

Hate those who do hate minorities!!!

Hate Russia!!!

Hate the people who do not hate Russia!!!

Hate the police!!!

Hate the people who do hate the police!!!

And so on…

Meanwhile:

But above all, do not hate corporate America!!!

They’re the good guys.

Buy buy buy buy buy buy buy!!!

The result?

Clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp.

The March of the Capitalist Zombies.

Bush II post-9/11 (https:/www.c-span.org/video?c4552776/bush-shopping-quote):

The American people…have got tuh [smarmy expression.]…go about their business.

[smarmy expression #2, #3, etc..] …[not get] to the point…where people don’t conduct business…where people don’t shop!

Post-the Blood For Oil Iraq War (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/washington/20text-bush.html) :

…and I encourage you to go shopping more.

So it goes…

Later…

AG

P.S. Regarding your Counterpunch opinion, read this vicious 2014 putdown of Putin from its primary editor, Jeffrey St. Claire (Google this one if you are curious-the site won’t even take a typed-out URL for it. “Sucuri” indeed!!):

Down the River With Vladimir Putin

—snip—

But the consensus of the [Colorado River] guides is clear. The crudest, cheapest and most demeaning patrons are Russian men, led by their President Vladimir Putin.

A couple of years ago Vladimir Putin journeyed to the American Southwest to take his son on an initiation ritual. The boy’s mother is now an American citizen. First stop was a big game ranch in Texas, where Putin and Jr blasted zebras, antelopes and bison. Apparently, Putin, reenacting a scene out of Mailer’s Why Are We In Vietnam, marked his son’s forehead in the blood of one of these hapless creatures.

Then it was on to Moab, Utah, for a raft trip down Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River. The Moab river guide community is still shaking its head from its close encounter with the Russian president and former KGB man. “We get a lot of whacked-out people coming down the river, but Putin really is a dangerous guy, a real mobster,” a guide told me.

“His packs were loaded with guns, vodka and tens of thousands of dollars in cash,” the guide said. “He seemed to be a little on edge. He was a real bully. He was drunk much of the time and bossed people around as if they were his personal slaves. They refused to use the Groover. They pissed and shat wherever they wanted. They fired off their guns. They caught channel catfish and bashed their heads in with rocks.”
Putin and his son were soon bored with the redbrick canyons and Class five rapids. “By the third day, Putin demanded that the guides call in a helicopter to have his party picked up and flown out. Then he got drunk and began to threaten the guides. He started bragging about how many people he had personally killed. More than 40, he said.”

The rafts finally exited Cataract and motored across 30 miles of Lake Powell’s flat water to the marina complex at Hite The next step on the Putties’ tour was supposed to be a four-wheeler excursion tearing up the desert in the bizarre Needles District of Canyonlands. But Putin opted for a more traditional form of initiation for his son, straight out of Notes from the Underground. From the Hite marina, he placed a call to Las Vegas.

“Get us some whores,” Putin shouted into his cellphone. “Price is no object.”
—snip—

Yup.

That damned Commie Jeffrey St. Claire surely loves him some Putin!!!

And yet…Counterpunch abounds with anti-RussiaGate articles.

Why?

As I said above, being anti-RussiaGate is not necessarily the same thing as being “pro-Russia.”

Or pro-Putin.

It’s just anti-hype!!!