Democrats Gone Mad: The Year of
Living Stupidly
By Glen Ford
“The corporate media’s
standing among the public
erodes by the day.”
July 16, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- For more than a year now, the
collective U.S. ruling class,
with Democratic Party and
corporate media operatives in
the vanguard, has frozen the
national political discourse in
a McCarthyite time warp. A
random visit to a July 26, 2016,
issue of the New York Times
reveals the same obsession as
that which consumes the
newspaper today: “Following the
Links from Russian Hackers to
the U.S. Election,” “Spy Agency
Consensus Grows That Russia
Hacked D.N.C.” A year later, the
allegations persist, piled ever
higher with innuendo and
outright nonsense. However,
proof of the predicate act --
that Russia, not Wikileaks,
penetrated the DNC -- remains
totally absent.
What is the purpose of this
torture-by-media? Clearly, the
Trump White House has been
crippled by the tsunami that
never ebbs, but the Democrats
have not been strengthened in
the process, and the corporate
media’s standing among the
public erodes by the day. A poll
conducted last month showed
majorities of voters want
Congress to ease up on Russia
investigations and get to work
on
healthcare, terrorism, national
security, the economy and jobs.
Almost three out of four
respondents to the
Harvard-Harris poll
said lawmakers aren’t paying
attention to the issues that are
important to them -- including
68 percent of Democrats.
Sixty-two percent of voters say
there is no hard evidence of
White House “collusion” with
Russia, and 64 percent think the
investigations are hurting the
country.
“That two out of three Americans
believe the so-called
‘mainstream’ press is full of
‘fake news’ -- including a
majority of Democrats.”
The non-stop vilification of
Russia and Trump has seriously
backfired on the corporate
media. Another poll by
Harvard-Harris, conducted
back in May,
showed that two out of three
Americans believe the so-called
“mainstream” press is full of
“fake news” -- including a
majority of Democrats. The
Russiagate blitzkrieg, designed
to delegitimize Trump and
demonize Vladimir Putin, has
exacerbated an already existing
crisis of legitimacy for the
entire U.S. political system.
“Every major institution from
the presidency to the courts is
now seen as operating in a
partisan fashion in one
direction or the other,” said
poll co-director Mark Penn.
The only unequivocal winner is
the bipartisan War Party, which
has used the manufactured crisis
to drench the nation in
anti-Russian hysteria – worse
than back in the bad old days of
the Red Scares. By March, Black
Congresswoman
Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) was
using much the same language as
Dick Cheney to describe the
Kremlin. “I think this
attack that we’ve experienced is
a form of war, a form of war on
our fundamental democratic
principles,” said the hopelessly
brainwashed representative of
the Black Misleadership Class.
“Liberal” Democratic Maryland
Rep. Ben Cardin called the
nonexistent “attack” a
“political Pearl Harbor.”
If the U.S. Congress actually
took seriously its
Constitutional powers to declare
war, the human race would
already have been exterminated.
“Sixty-two percent of voters say
there is no hard evidence of
White House ‘collusion’ with
Russia.”
So insane have the Democrats
become, that we are probably
better off with war powers
effectively in the hands of
Donald Trump, than with
California’s Barbara Lee, the
only member of Congress that
voted against the invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001. She was in
her “right mind” then, but no
longer. Trump’s willingness to
talk with the leader of Russia,
in Hamburg, infuriated Rep. Lee,
who tweeted:
“Outraged by
President Trump’s 2 hr meeting
w/Putin, the man who
orchestrated attacks on our
democracy. Where do his
loyalties lie?” A better
question is: When and where did
Lee join the War Party?
The dogs of war at U.S.
intelligence agencies have led
the charge against Trump since
they encamped at Hillary
Clinton’s campaign headquarters,
last year. The spoiled oligarch
was not trusted to maintain the
momentum of the U.S. military
offensive begun by Barack Obama
in 2011, with the unprovoked war
against Libya. The state of war
must be preserved, whatever the
cost to the empire’s domestic
institutions. Skilled in the
arts of regime change, the
spooks joined with their
longtime partners in corporate
media propaganda, to foment a
“color revolution” at home.
Barbara Lee is a recent recruit.
“The Lords of Capital
effectively shut the Democrats
down decades ago.”
Although the Democrats will
ultimately harm themselves with
the electorate by folding into
the War Party, it suits the
purposes of party leadership and
the fat cats that finance them.
The ruling class has nothing to
offer the people except the
total insecurity of gig-jobs and
austerity. The Lords of Capital
effectively shut the Democrats
down decades ago.
They can campaign as if there
really is a clash of ideas about
the organization of society, but
they must propose nothing that
fundamentally conflicts with the
steady consolidation of wealth
and power by the oligarchy (the
American one, not the Russians).
That goes for Bernie Sanders,
too. Heard anything about single
payer from him, lately?
The “all
Russiagate, all the time”
information regime -- which also
prepares the public for a wider
war scenario – provides the
illusion of motion that passes
for “resistance” to the rule of
the rich, as personified by
Donald Trump. But there has been
no Democratic program to reorder
society for at least a
generation. And now, under the
New McCarthyism, the only
politics that is allowed is war
politics, consisting of
denunciations of those who
threaten “our
fundamental democratic
principles” – which need not be
defined or even proven to exist.
That’s why it has been an empty
year, albeit a very loud one. As
Gil Scott-Heron sang in “Winter
in America,”
“Nobody’s fighting, ‘cause
nobody knows what to save.”
This article was first
published by
BAR
-
