Politics

FOCUS: Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer, David Brooks on Making America Great Again

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27509">Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch</a>

Tuesday, 28 February 2017 12:55

Bacevich writes: "Apart from being a police officer, firefighter, or soldier engaged in one of this nation's endless wars, writing a column for a major American newspaper has got to be one of the toughest and most unforgiving jobs there is. The pay may be decent (at least if your gig is with one of the major papers in New York or Washington), but the pressures to perform on cue are undoubtedly relentless."

David Brooks. (photo: NBC News)

Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer, David Brooks on Making America Great Again

By Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch

28 February 17

The members of what TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America�s War for the Greater Middle East, calls �the Church of America the Redeemer� are in some disarray these days and in quite an uproar over the new Pope and his aberrant set of cardinals now ensconced in Washington. Perhaps there was no more striking -- or shocking -- evidence of that than the brief comments that hit the front page of the New York Times last week in an article on a month of �turmoil� in the Trump White House, but never became a headline story nationally. Amid the hurricane of news about the fall of national security adviser of 24 days Michael Flynn, the reported contacts of Trump associates with Russia, and a flurry of leaks to major papers from what are assumedly significant figures in the intelligence community (talk about "feud"!), one thing should have stood out. Here�s the passage from that Times piece: "Gen. Tony Thomas, head of the military�s Special Operations Command, expressed concern about upheaval inside the White House. 'Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil. I hope they sort it out soon because we�re a nation at war,' he said at a military conference on Tuesday. Asked about his comments later, General Thomas said in a brief interview, 'As a commander, I�m concerned our government be as stable as possible.'�

It may not have looked like much, but it should have stunned the news media and the country. That it didn�t tells us a great deal about how the U.S. has changed since September 11, 2001. Thomas, the head of the cr�me de la cr�me, secretive military force (all 70,000 of them) cocooned inside the U.S. military, had just broken the unwritten rules of the American political game in a major way. He fired what amounted to an implicit warning shot across the bow of the Trump administration's listing ship of state: Mr. President, we are at war and you better get your house in order fast. Really? Direct public criticism of the president from a top commander in a military once renowned for its commitment to staying above the political fray? Consider that something new under the sun and evidence that what might once have been considered a clich� -- sooner or later wars always come home -- is now an ever more realistic description of just where we�ve ended up 15-plus years after the Bush administration launched the war on terror. Seven days in May? Maybe not, but when the nation's top special warrior starts worrying in public about whether civilian leaders are up to the task of governing, it's no ordinary day in February.

It�s true, of course, that in many graphic ways -- including the migration of spying devices developed on this country's distant battlefields to police departments here, drone surveillance flights not in Afghanistan but over this country, and the increasing militarization of our police -- our wars in the Greater Middle East have indeed made their way back to �the homeland.� Still, not like this, not directly into the sacrosanct heartland of democracy and of the political elite, into what Bacevich might call the precincts of the American political Vatican, where those like New York Times columnist David Brooks once happily opined about American �greatness.� It seems that we�re now plunged into the political equivalent of war in the nation�s capital, even if in the fog of battle it�s still a little hard to tell just who is who on that battlefield.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer
David Brooks on Making America Great Again

part from being a police officer, firefighter, or soldier engaged in one of this nation�s endless wars, writing a column for a major American newspaper has got to be one of the toughest and most unforgiving jobs there is. The pay may be decent (at least if your gig is with one of the major papers in New York or Washington), but the pressures to perform on cue are undoubtedly relentless.

Anyone who has ever tried cramming a coherent and ostensibly insightful argument into a mere 750 words knows what I�m talking about. Writing op-eds does not perhaps qualify as high art. Yet, like tying flies or knitting sweaters, it requires no small amount of skill. Performing the trick week in and week out without too obviously recycling the same ideas over and over again -- or at least while disguising repetitions and concealing inconsistencies -- requires notable gifts.

David Brooks of the New York Times is a gifted columnist. Among contemporary journalists, he is our Walter Lippmann, the closest thing we have to an establishment-approved public intellectual. As was the case with Lippmann, Brooks works hard to suppress the temptation to rant. He shuns raw partisanship. In his frequent radio and television appearances, he speaks in measured tones. Dry humor and ironic references abound. And like Lippmann, when circumstances change, he makes at least a show of adjusting his views accordingly.

For all that, Brooks remains an ideologue. In his columns, and even more so in his weekly appearances on NPR and PBS, he plays the role of the thoughtful, non-screaming conservative, his very presence affirming the ideological balance that, until November 8th of last year, was a prized hallmark of �respectable� journalism. Just as that balance always involved considerable posturing, so, too, with the ostensible conservatism of David Brooks: it�s an act.

Praying at the Altar of American Greatness

In terms of confessional fealty, his true allegiance is not to conservatism as such, but to the Church of America the Redeemer. This is a virtual congregation, albeit one possessing many of the attributes of a more traditional religion. The Church has its own Holy Scripture, authenticated on July 4, 1776, at a gathering of 56 prophets. And it has its own saints, prominent among them the Good Thomas Jefferson, chief author of the sacred text (not the Bad Thomas Jefferson who owned and impregnated slaves); Abraham Lincoln, who freed said slaves and thereby suffered martyrdom (on Good Friday no less); and, of course, the duly canonized figures most credited with saving the world itself from evil: Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, their status akin to that of saints Peter and Paul in Christianity. The Church of America the Redeemer even has its own Jerusalem, located on the banks of the Potomac, and its own hierarchy, its members situated nearby in High Temples of varying architectural distinction.

This ecumenical enterprise does not prize theological rigor. When it comes to shalts and shalt nots, it tends to be flexible, if not altogether squishy. It demands of the faithful just one thing: a fervent belief in America�s mission to remake the world in its own image. Although in times of crisis Brooks has occasionally gone a bit wobbly, he remains at heart a true believer.

In a March 1997 piece for The Weekly Standard, his then-employer, he summarized his credo. Entitled �A Return to National Greatness,� the essay opened with a glowing tribute to the Library of Congress and, in particular, to the building completed precisely a century earlier to house its many books and artifacts. According to Brooks, the structure itself embodied the aspirations defining America�s enduring purpose. He called particular attention to the dome above the main reading room decorated with a dozen �monumental figures� representing the advance of civilization and culminating in a figure representing America itself. Contemplating the imagery, Brooks rhapsodized:

�The theory of history depicted in this mural gave America impressive historical roots, a spiritual connection to the centuries. And it assigned a specific historic role to America as the latest successor to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. In the procession of civilization, certain nations rise up to make extraordinary contributions... At the dawn of the 20th century, America was to take its turn at global supremacy. It was America's task to take the grandeur of past civilizations, modernize it, and democratize it. This common destiny would unify diverse Americans and give them a great national purpose.�

This February, 20 years later, in a column with an identical title, but this time appearing in the pages of his present employer, the New York Times, Brooks revisited this theme. Again, he began with a paean to the Library of Congress and its spectacular dome with its series of �monumental figures� that placed America �at the vanguard of the great human march of progress.� For Brooks, those 12 allegorical figures convey a profound truth.

�America is the grateful inheritor of other people�s gifts. It has a spiritual connection to all people in all places, but also an exceptional role. America culminates history. It advances a way of life and a democratic model that will provide people everywhere with dignity. The things Americans do are not for themselves only, but for all mankind.�

In 1997, in the midst of the Clinton presidency, Brooks had written that �America�s mission was to advance civilization itself.� In 2017, as Donald Trump gained entry into the Oval Office, he embellished and expanded that mission, describing a nation �assigned by providence to spread democracy and prosperity; to welcome the stranger; to be brother and sister to the whole human race.�

Back in 1997, �a moment of world supremacy unlike any other,� Brooks had worried that his countrymen might not seize the opportunity that was presenting itself. On the cusp of the twenty-first century, he worried that Americans had �discarded their pursuit of national greatness in just about every particular.� The times called for a leader like Theodore Roosevelt, who wielded that classic �big stick� and undertook monster projects like the Panama Canal. Yet Americans were stuck instead with Bill Clinton, a small-bore triangulator. �We no longer look at history as a succession of golden ages,� Brooks lamented. �And, save in the speeches of politicians who usually have no clue what they are talking about,� America was no longer fulfilling its �special role as the vanguard of civilization.�

By early 2017, with Donald Trump in the White House and Steve Bannon whispering in his ear, matters had become worse still. Americans had seemingly abandoned their calling outright. �The Trump and Bannon anschluss has exposed the hollowness of our patriotism,� wrote Brooks, inserting the now-obligatory reference to Nazi Germany. The November 2016 presidential election had �exposed how attenuated our vision of national greatness has become and how easy it was for Trump and Bannon to replace a youthful vision of American greatness with a reactionary, alien one.� That vision now threatens to leave America as �just another nation, hunkered down in a fearful world.�

What exactly happened between 1997 and 2017, you might ask? What occurred during that �moment of world supremacy� to reduce the United States from a nation summoned to redeem humankind to one hunkered down in fear?

Trust Brooks to have at hand a brow-furrowing explanation. The fault, he explains, lies with an �educational system that doesn�t teach civilizational history or real American history but instead a shapeless multiculturalism,� as well as with �an intellectual culture that can�t imagine providence.� Brooks blames �people on the left who are uncomfortable with patriotism and people on the right who are uncomfortable with the federal government that is necessary to lead our project.�

An America that no longer believes in itself -- that�s the problem. In effect, Brooks revises Norma Desmond�s famous complaint about the movies, now repurposed to diagnose an ailing nation: it�s the politics that got small.

Nowhere does he consider the possibility that his formula for �national greatness� just might be so much hooey. Between 1997 and 2017, after all, egged on by people like David Brooks, Americans took a stab at �greatness,� with the execrable Donald Trump now numbering among the eventual results.

Invading Greatness

Say what you will about the shortcomings of the American educational system and the country�s intellectual culture, they had far less to do with creating Trump than did popular revulsion prompted by specific policies that Brooks, among others, enthusiastically promoted. Not that he is inclined to tally up the consequences. Only as a sort of postscript to his litany of contemporary American ailments does he refer even in passing to what he calls the �humiliations of Iraq.�

A great phrase, that. Yet much like, say, the �tragedy of Vietnam� or the �crisis of Watergate,� it conceals more than it reveals. Here, in short, is a succinct historical reference that cries out for further explanation. It bursts at the seams with implications demanding to be unpacked, weighed, and scrutinized. Brooks shrugs off Iraq as a minor embarrassment, the equivalent of having shown up at a dinner party wearing the wrong clothes.

Under the circumstances, it�s easy to forget that, back in 2003, he and other members of the Church of America the Redeemer devoutly supported the invasion of Iraq. They welcomed war. They urged it. They did so not because Saddam Hussein was uniquely evil -- although he was evil enough -- but because they saw in such a war the means for the United States to accomplish its salvific mission. Toppling Saddam and transforming Iraq would provide the mechanism for affirming and renewing America�s �national greatness.�

Anyone daring to disagree with that proposition they denounced as craven or cowardly. Writing at the time, Brooks disparaged those opposing the war as mere �marchers.� They were effete, pretentious, ineffective, and absurd. �These people are always in the streets with their banners and puppets. They march against the IMF and World Bank one day, and against whatever war happens to be going on the next... They just march against.�

Perhaps space constraints did not permit Brooks in his recent column to spell out the �humiliations� that resulted and that even today continue to accumulate. Here in any event is a brief inventory of what that euphemism conceals: thousands of Americans needlessly killed; tens of thousands grievously wounded in body or spirit; trillions of dollars wasted; millions of Iraqis dead, injured, or displaced; this nation�s moral standing compromised by its resort to torture, kidnapping, assassination, and other perversions; a region thrown into chaos and threatened by radical terrorist entities like the Islamic State that U.S. military actions helped foster. And now, if only as an oblique second-order bonus, we have Donald Trump�s elevation to the presidency to boot.

In refusing to reckon with the results of the war he once so ardently endorsed, Brooks is hardly alone. Members of the Church of America the Redeemer, Democrats and Republicans alike, are demonstrably incapable of rendering an honest accounting of what their missionary efforts have yielded.

Brooks belongs, or once did, to the Church�s neoconservative branch. But liberals such as Bill Clinton, along with his secretary of state Madeleine Albright, were congregants in good standing, as were Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton. So, too, are putative conservatives like Senators John McCain, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, all of them subscribing to the belief in the singularity and indispensability of the United States as the chief engine of history, now and forever.

Back in April 2003, confident that the fall of Baghdad had ended the Iraq War, Brooks predicted that �no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, �We were wrong. Bush was right.�" Rather than admitting error, he continued, the war�s opponents �will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future.�

Yet it is the war�s proponents who, in the intervening years, have choked on admitting that they were wrong. Or when making such an admission, as did both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton while running for president, they write it off as an aberration, a momentary lapse in judgment of no particular significance, like having guessed wrong on a TV quiz show.

Rather than requiring acts of contrition, the Church of America the Redeemer has long promulgated a doctrine of self-forgiveness, freely available to all adherents all the time. �You think our country�s so innocent?� the nation�s 45th president recently barked at a TV host who had the temerity to ask how he could have kind words for the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Observers professed shock that a sitting president would openly question American innocence.

In fact, Trump�s response and the kerfuffle that ensued both missed the point. No serious person believes that the United States is �innocent.� Worshipers in the Church of America the Redeemer do firmly believe, however, that America�s transgressions, unlike those of other countries, don�t count against it. Once committed, such sins are simply to be set aside and then expunged, a process that allows American politicians and pundits to condemn a �killer� like Putin with a perfectly clear conscience while demanding that Donald Trump do the same.

What the Russian president has done in Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria qualifies as criminal. What American presidents have done in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya qualifies as incidental and, above all, beside the point.

Rather than confronting the havoc and bloodshed to which the United States has contributed, those who worship in the Church of America the Redeemer keep their eyes fixed on the far horizon and the work still to be done in aligning the world with American expectations. At least they would, were it not for the arrival at center stage of a manifestly false prophet who, in promising to �make America great again,� inverts all that �national greatness� is meant to signify.

For Brooks and his fellow believers, the call to �greatness� emanates from faraway precincts -- in the Middle East, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. For Trump, the key to �greatness� lies in keeping faraway places and the people who live there as faraway as possible. Brooks et al. see a world that needs saving and believe that it�s America�s calling to do just that. In Trump�s view, saving others is not a peculiarly American responsibility. Events beyond our borders matter only to the extent that they affect America�s well-being. Trump worships in the Church of America First, or at least pretends to do so in order to impress his followers.

That Donald Trump inhabits a universe of his own devising, constructed of carefully arranged alt-facts, is no doubt the case. Yet, in truth, much the same can be said of David Brooks and others sharing his view of a country providentially charged to serve as the �successor to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.� In fact, this conception of America�s purpose expresses not the intent of providence, which is inherently ambiguous, but their own arrogance and conceit. Out of that conceit comes much mischief. And in the wake of mischief come charlatans like Donald Trump.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of America�s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, now out in paperback.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse�s Next Time They�ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

12 comments

FOCUS: Lies the White House Sells Us

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</a>

Tuesday, 28 February 2017 11:41

Boardman writes: "'Fake news' as a denunciation peddled by Republican and Trump apparatchiks is an old-fashioned, fascist-style Big Lie with a neat capitalist twist. The obvious lie is that most of the media, accused of reporting 'fake news,' actually report real news - with real corrections when they get something wrong."

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon in the Oval Office. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Lies the White House Sells Us

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

28 February 17

The lying is non-stop, but who believes what they�re saying?

ake news� as a denunciation peddled by Republican and Trump apparatchiks is an old-fashioned, fascist-style Big Lie with a neat capitalist twist. The obvious lie is that most of the media, accused of reporting �fake news,� actually report real news � with real corrections when they get something wrong. This is the antithesis of the way the �conservative� con machine has operated for decades. Among the world�s shortest books would be �Setting the Record Straight by Republican Senators� or �The Collected Corrections of Donald Trump.� These are people whose common currency is falsehood rooted in deceit for the good of themselves and not much of anyone else, certainly not most of the people that they were elected to represent, wink-wink. Chronic right-wing lying is hardly a new phenomenon. Lies about FDR and the Red Menace live on long after the imaginary threats have passed into history. So, too, with Saddam Hussein�s fictitious weapons of mass destruction, the WMDs that turned out to be, in reality, members of the Bush administration. In recent decades the right-wing lying machine has grown increasingly institutionalized, like a great false culture network producing serial hit jobs based on deliberately fraudulent premises such as Obama�s birth certificate, ISR bias against Tea Party 501(c)(4) applicants, or Hillary Clinton�s bloodbath at Benghazi. Now the soullessness of unending mendacity has overtaken the White House, and the country is awash in liars claiming lies are truth and calling truth-tellers liars.

Well, why not? It�s a business model that has worked. Since 1996, with Fox News and the Drudge Report, businesses built on peddling lies as commodities have flourished. Their ilk have proliferated beyond enumeration in a still-expanding market. Breitbart News joined that market in 2007 and within a decade seated itself in the White House with an administration equally uninterested in anything like intellectual integrity. The Fake News industry is now in power, with the enviably perverse opportunity of calling its opponents �fake news� purveyors. That this Orwellian inversion of reality is widely believed reflects the success of the Fake News outlets in making alternative facts seem credible. Years of repeated lies, met with weak or no serious challenge, and sometimes with collusion, have encouraged a populaces to believe whatever it wants to believe, regardless of fact-based evidence. The Fake News industry seems unlikely to go away any time soon, despite increasing popular pushback. The raw material for dishonesty is inexpensive and inexhaustible. When one lie doesn�t turn a profit, monetarily or politically, that lie is easily abandoned (and denied) in favor of the next lie that may catch on.

�The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.�
� William F. Buckley, Jr.

A current example of a predatory lie designed to undercut citizen assertiveness, probably still in beta, arrived February 27 from the White House:

There is an incredible spirit of optimism sweeping across the Nation�.

The President is checking off the promises he made to the American people, and he won�t stop until the job is done.

The forgotten men and women of this great Nation will be forgotten no longer.

That is the heart of this movement. As President Trump has made clear, this is your country and this is your Government, and now we want to hear from you.

The email conveying this version of reality also invites the reader to take a White House survey. The first section invites the reader to select the �most significant accomplishments� of the Trump administration from a list of ten, NONE of which are actual accomplishments (at best, plans that may lead to accomplishments). Unsurprisingly, the list omits any reference to special ops in Yemen or any aspect of immigration. The second section includes a list of 12 �issues,� mostly vague and abstract (such as �Budget,� �Taxes,� �Jobs�) but occasionally pointed (such as �National Security and Fighting ISIS� or �Repeal and Replace Obamacare�). Among the issues omitted are ending the war in Afghanistan (or fill-in-the-blank) or replacing Obamacare with single payer healthcare (or any other alternative). The form also offers boxes for �ideas� and �comments.� One respondent�s ideas included �End foreign wars� and �End domestic terror (white nationalists, police violence, clinic bombing, etc).� The same respondent�s comments included �Tell the truth. About everything. Start with the President�s taxes and business ties.�

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
� Donald Trump, tweet Feb 17, 2017

A few days ago, I called the fake news �the enemy of the people� -- and they are. They are the enemy of the people.
� Donald Trump, CPAC 2017

For the Trump White House, the media include real enemies, naming The New York Times and CNN among them (Unlike Nixon�s enemies list, Trump�s list is at least partly public.). In response to continuing White House hostility, the Times ran a supposedly �hard-hitting� 30-second TV ad during the Oscars, its first TV advertising since 2010. �The Truth is hard,� the $2 million Times ad told viewers. So was watching the ad, which began with a verbal montage, first a couple of apparently true statements (�The trust in our nation is more divided than ever� and �The truth is alternative facts are lies�) before ducking down a rabbit hole of absurdist contradiction. This starts ungrammatically with �The truth is the media is dishonest,� then �The truth is a woman should dress like a woman� then �The Truth is women�s rights are human rights� and then a speeded-up welter of assertions more confusing than compelling. The Times ad ends by slowly making its point: �The truth is hard� to find� to know�. The truth is more important now than ever.�

All this may be true, but the Times spent $2 million to tell us the obvious, with the apparent subliminal message that we can trust the Times to tell the truth. The problem is: we can�t. This is the same Times that, through the good offices of Judith Miller and her editors, helped the Bush administration take us into a stupid war now well into its second decade with little more to show for it than regional chaos and a distrust in the US government heightened to the point that we�ve elected a president dedicated to taking that government apart, if not destroying it. Instead of self-servingly investing in its own image, the Times could have done more public good by confronting just one Trump lie unambiguously head-on. There are at least 100 Trump falsehoods to choose from, some of them admittedly petty taken alone, but impressive as part of a pattern of prevarication. That might have been too much for a short ad. The repeated Trump lie that he inherited �a mess� from Obama might have been too complicated for a short ad, since the �mess� included a stable economy and no foreign crisis. But the Times might have made a stronger point using this statement from White House press secretary Sean Spicer on February 21, talking about the mass roundup of immigrants and suspected immigrants:

The president needed to give guidance, especially after what they went through in the last administration, where there were so many carve-outs that ICE agents and CBP members didn�t�had to figure out each individual, whether or not they fit in a particular category, and they could adjudicate that case. The president wanted to take the shackles off individuals in these agencies and say, "You have a mission. There are laws that need to be followed. You should do your mission and follow the law."

Those �carve-outs,� adjudicating each case on its own merits, that�s fundamental due process of law. And the �guidance� the White House says it gave to ICE agents is, no matter how you read it, violate the Constitution. There�s no lie there. The President tells government officials to violate the Constitution, as confirmed by his press secretary and observed on the streets, and this gets little attention? Isn�t that a form of fake news?

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

26 comments

Tom Perez: A Good Man in a Bad Situation

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</a>

Tuesday, 28 February 2017 09:11

Ash writes: "Tom Perez has good progressive credentials. He's certainly not a bad guy to head the DNC. Perez isn't the problem - it's the people who engineered his rise to the chairmanship who are."

Former Obama labor secretary and newly elected DNC chairman Tom Perez. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Tom Perez: A Good Man in a Bad Situation

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

28 February 17

om Perez has good progressive credentials. He�s certainly not a bad guy to head the DNC. Perez isn�t the problem � it�s the people who engineered his rise to the chairmanship who are.

The entrenched old-guard Democratic Party leadership backed and elected Perez, and they don�t want change. Jill Abramson hit the nail on the head with her recent piece titled, �The Clintons turned the Democratic party over to donors. Can it recover?�

To be precise, Tom Perez�s assent to chair was more due to the direct hand of now former President Obama than to any apparent involvement by the Clintons. So what caused Obama to jump in and try to influence the race for DNC chair? Likely a control thing, control as in Perez being loyal to Obama and control of the Democratic Party. Perez was Secretary of Labor under Obama, and there was a chain-of-command relationship already in place. Arguably there is again, now that Perez heads the DNC.

Keith Ellison was Bernie Sanders� guy. The Democratic old guard sees Sanders as a threat, much to Bernie�s delight. Bernie is not shy about his intentions. He wants reform. For starters, he wants to keep the donors at a safe distance and return the agenda to the voters. Ellison embraced that. Perez, however, thinks he can have it all ways.

Essentially, Perez�s assignment is to unify and energize the base without offending the deep-pocketed campaign financiers. While naming Ellison as Deputy Chair was a nice gesture, it does little to loosen the grip on power by the established wing of the party, or to prioritize policy over fundraising. What the corporate-friendly Democratic hierarchy cannot see is the elephant on the coffee table. The base is already energized � big time.

What the Democratic Party overlords have lost sight of is that a more dedicated, engaged base can easily compensate for the loss of a few campaign investors. Yes, there is always fear of losing campaign financing, but where are the donors getting the party now? Grassroots campaigns can and often do succeed in the face of funding deficits. The outrage is political power, though few in the Democratic old guard can see it.

Donald Trump is generating outraged Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans at a record-setting pace. Like it or not, Tom Perez may be forced to play Uncle Tom before this is over. It�s probably not who he wants to be, but if he can�t stand up to the party bosses and their backers, he�ll be left, as Dylan wrote and sang, �blocking up the hall � for the times they are a-changing.� Tom Perez is a good man, but can he be his own man?

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

36 comments

The Story of the Week Is Trump, Russia and the FBI. The Rest Is a Distraction

Monday, 27 February 2017 13:52

Nance writes: "Any investigation involving Trump advisers and Russian intelligence is serious stuff. If borne out, it has the potential to become the greatest political scandal in American history."

Any investigation involving Trump advisers and Russian intelligence is serious stuff. (photo: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP)

The Story of the Week Is Trump, Russia and the FBI. The Rest Is a Distraction

By Malcolm Nance, Guardian UK

27 February 17

The White House reportedly tried to influence an active counter-intelligence investigation. All else, press ban included, is designed to deflect attention

arrative switching. That is what the Trump administration is desperately trying to do around Russia right now. The White House reportedly interfered with the FBI in the middle of an active investigation involving counter-intelligence. This was not only foolhardy but also suspicious, as it directly undermined their apparent objective: distracting us.

On 14 February, the New York Times reported that advisers and associates of Donald Trump may have been in direct and continuous contact with officers of the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, during a tumultuous election campaign in which the American democracy itself was hacked. A major party � now in opposition � was the victim of an unprecedented cyber-attack.

According to the Times, intercepted telephone calls and phone records indicated to American counter-intelligence officers direct contact with the Russians.

The stakes are high. Most Democrats and more than a few Republicans believe this investigation could unearth details that could plunge the nation into a political and constitutional crisis not seen since the secession of the South in 1860 and 1861.

The Trump administration has repeatedly denied the characterization and defended the campaign�s conduct. However, its denials have always been couched in the most legalistic terms and each falls apart with every new revelation. It doesn�t help that Trump himself calls the allegations �fake news� then validates the reporting by attacking the leaks � suggesting that they are true.

Now, thanks to CNN, we learned on Thursday that Trump�s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, had reportedly contacted the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and requested that the bureau publicly characterize the Times story as not being serious � in McCabe�s reported words, �total BS�.

When this was rebuffed by McCabe, Priebus reportedly went to the FBI director, James Comey, who allegedly also refused to comment publicly. Priebus then allegedly asked both if he could quote them anonymously as �top intelligence officials�, saying the story was totally wrong. According to CNN, McCabe and Comey agreed to let him do that, despite the fact that the FBI and the White House are prohibited from communicating about open investigations.

The White House then turned to other intelligence officials and to members of Congress. According to the Washington Post, House and Senate intelligence committee chairs Devin Nunes and Richard Burr were asked to push back against Russian stories that did not favor the administration. They told the Post they did so.

No matter what the contention, the fundamental fact exists that the FBI, based on McCabe�s and Comey�s remarks, has inadvertently verified that there is, in fact, a counter-intelligence investigation going on involving the associates of the president. Until now the investigation had only been reported through anonymous sources.

This bungled attempt to manage the media reveals the fear in the White House: that there may actually be a smoking gun that ties Trump to Moscow�s hacking.

It is always possible that Trump�s then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, former adviser Carter Page and others may have been in contact with Russians as part of foreign policy development. But given the political environment in the summer of 2016, after the hack of the Democratic National Committee, it is very hard to believe that any continuous and repeated contact with the Kremlin was completely innocent.

Priebus�s clumsy attempt to perform perception management judo only added fuel to the fire. Then it was raked over with Trump�s often incomprehensible flamethrower rhetoric when he declared CNN reporting �fake news� and had them banned, with the New York Times and other outlets including the Guardian, from a press gaggle on Friday.

Any investigation involving Trump advisers and Russian intelligence is serious stuff. If borne out, it has the potential to become the greatest political scandal in American history. But this meddling by the White House is one step too far. It is not typical Washington pushback. It smacks of a strategy of cover-up.

It is high time for the House and Senate to form independent select subcommittees to ferret out the truth. The key questions are simple. What did Trump and his staff know about the hacks? When did they know it and were they complicit in any way?

If American citizens worked alongside a foreign power to interfere in American democracy, it must be found out and quickly. It is crucial to retain the trust in our president and the electoral process. The stakes are nothing less than the legitimacy of American liberal democracy.

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FOCUS | The Art of the Trumpaclysm: How the US Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</a>

Monday, 27 February 2017 12:39

Engelhardt writes: "We're now living in Donald Trump's America (which I certainly didn't either predict or imagine in March 2015); we're living, that is, in an ever more chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent it's run at all) by billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state."

Donald Trump at an AIPAC conference. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

The Art of the Trumpaclysm: How the US Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

27 February 17

Reviews of our latest Dispatch book, John Feffer's superb dystopian novel, Splinterlands, are just beginning to come in and they're uniformly superb. The Washington City Paper, citing its "brilliance," writes, "If you�re having a hard time deciding whether to read 1984 or The Origins of Totalitarianism -- or if you�ve already read them both and want something in-between -- consider local author John Feffer�s Splinterlands." The Midwest Book Review adds, "Readers who enjoy dystopian stories that hold more than a light look at political structures and their downfall will more than appreciate the in-depth approach John Feffer takes in his novel." I urge you to support TomDispatch (and get a riveting late night read) by picking up a copy, or for a $100 donation ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), get your own signed, personalized copy from the author via our donation page (where numerous other books of our moment are also available) and give this site a real helping hand.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

The Art of the Trumpaclysm
How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself

t�s been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it's been! It�s driving people back to newspapers (online, if not in print) and ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack for �breaking news� or audiences. It�s a smash in both the Hollywood and car accident sense of the term, a phenomenon the likes of which we�ve simply never experienced. Think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and the cameras rolled. It�s proved, in every way, to be a giant leak. A faucet. A spigot. An absolute flood of non-news, quarter-news, half-news, crazed news, fake news, and over-the-top actual news.

And you know exactly what -- and whom -- I�m talking about. No need to explain. I mean, you tell me: What doesn�t it have? Its lead actor is the closest we�ve come in our nation's capital to an action figure. Think of him as the Mar-a-Lego version of Batman and the Joker rolled into one, a president who, as he told us at a news conference recently, is �the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life� and the �least racist person� as well. As report after report indicates, he attacks, lashes out, mocks, tweets, pummels, charges, and complains, showering calumny on others even as he praises his achievements without surcease. Think of him as the towering inferno of twenty-first-century American politics or a modern Godzilla eternally emerging from New York harbor.

As for his supporting cast? Islamophobes, Iranophobes, white nationalists; bevies of billionaires and multimillionaires; a resurgent stock market gone wild; the complete fossil fuel industry and every crackpot climate change �skeptic� in town; a press spokesman immortalized by Saturday Night Live whose afternoon briefings are already beating the soap opera General Hospital in the ratings; a White House counselor whose expertise is in �alternative facts�; a national security adviser who (with a tenure of 24 days) seemed to sum up the concept of �insecurity�; a White House chief of staff and liaison with the Republicans in Congress who�s already being sized up for extinction, as well as a couple of appointees who were �dismissed� or even frog-marched out of their offices and jobs for having criticized The Donald and not fessed up... honestly, you couldn�t make this stuff up, or rather only Trump himself can do so. And by the way, just so you know, based on the last weeks of �news� I could keep this paragraph going more or less forever without even breaking into a sweat.

Among so many subjects I haven�t even mentioned, including Melania and former wife Ivana -- is it even possible that she could become the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic? -- there are, of course, the Trump kids and their businesses and the instantly broken promises on (such an old-fashioned phrase) their conflicts of interest and the conflicts about those conflicts and the presidential tweets, threats, and bluster that have gone with them, not to speak of the issue of for-pay access to the new president. And how about Trump�s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (another walking conflict of you-know-what), who reputedly had a role in the appointment of the new ambassador to Israel, a New York bankruptcy lawyer known for raising millions of dollars to fund a West Bank Jewish settlement and for calling supporters of the liberal Jewish group J Street �far worse than kapos� (Jews who aided the Nazis in their concentration camps). Kushner has now been ordained America�s ultimate peacemaker in the Middle East. And don�t forget that sons Donald and Eric are already saving memorabilia for the future Trump presidential library, a concept that should take your breath away. (Just imagine a library with those giant golden letters over its entrance to honor a man who proudly doesn�t read books and, as with presidential executive orders and possibly even volumes he�s �written,� signs off on things he�s barely bothered to check out.)

And speaking of Rome (remember Nero fiddling?), have you noticed that these days all news roads lead back to... well, Donald Trump? Take my word for it: nothing happens in our world any longer that doesn�t relate to him and his people (or, by definition, it simply didn�t happen). Since he rode that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, his greatest skill has, without any doubt, been his ability to suck up all the media air in any room, whether that �room� is the Oval Office, Washington, or the world at large. He speaks at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, amid angry outbursts on leaks from the intelligence community and attacks on �the dishonest media� for essentially firing his national security adviser, he suddenly turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian issue and says, �So, I'm looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I'm very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians -- if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I'm happy with the one they like the best.� And the world as we�ve known it in the Middle East is suddenly turned upside down and inside out.

Generalizing

In its way, even 20 months after it began, it�s all still so remarkable and new, and if it isn�t like being in the path of a tornado, you tell me what it's like. So no one should be surprised at just how difficult it is to step outside the storm of this never-ending moment, to find some -- any -- vantage point offering the slightest perspective on the Trumpaclysm that�s hit our world.

Still, odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trump�s presidency came from somewhere, developed out of something. To think of it (as many of those resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the presidential version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.

Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of history. He�s unimaginable without it. This, in turn, means that the radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics, and governance. In that sense, to generalize (if you�ll excuse the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we�ve been living in for some years now, even if we�d prefer to pretend otherwise.

After all, it�s clearly a government of, by, and evidently for the billionaires and the generals, which pretty much sums up where we�ve been heading for the last decade and a half anyway. Let�s start with those generals. In the 15 years before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington became a permanent war capital; war, a permanent feature of our American world; and the military, the most admired institution of American life, the one in which we have the most confidence among an otherwise fading crew, including the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, banks, television news, newspapers, big business, and Congress (in that descending order).

Support for that military in the form of staggering sums of taxpayer dollars (which are about to soar yet again) is one of the few things congressional Democrats and Republicans can still agree on. The military-industrial complex rides ever higher (despite Trumpian tweets about the price of F-35s); police across the country have been armed like so many military forces, while the technology of war on America�s distant battlefields -- from Stingrays to MRAPs to military surveillance drones -- has come home big time, and we�ve been SWATified.

This country has, in other words, been militarized in all sorts of ways, both obvious and less so, in a fashion that Americans once might not have imagined possible. In the process, declaring and making war has increasingly become -- the Constitution be damned -- the sole preoccupation of the White House without significant reference to Congress. Meanwhile, thanks to the drone assassination program run directly out of the Oval Office, the president, in these years, has become an assassin-in-chief as well as commander-in-chief.

Under the circumstances, no one should have been surprised when Donald Trump turned to the very generals he criticized in the election campaign, men who fought 15 years of losing wars that they bitterly feel should have been won. In his government, they have, of course, now taken over -- a historic first -- what had largely been the civilian posts of secretary of defense, secretary of homeland security, national security adviser, and National Security Council chief of staff. Think of it as a junta light and little more than the next logical step in the further militarization of this country.

It�s striking, for instance, that when the president finally fired his national security adviser, 24 days into his presidency, all but one of the other figures that he reportedly considered for a post often occupied by a civilian were retired generals (and an admiral), or in the case of the person he actually tapped to be his second national security adviser, a still-active Army general. This reflects a distinct American reality of the twenty-first century that The Donald has simply absorbed like the human sponge he is. As a result, America�s permanent wars, all relative disasters of one sort or another, will now be overseen by men who were, for the last decade and a half, deeply implicated in them. It�s a formula for further disaster, of course, but no matter.

Other future Trumpian steps -- like the possible mobilization of the National Guard, more than half a century after guardsmen helped desegregate the University of Alabama, to carry out the mass deportation of illegal immigrants -- will undoubtedly be in the same mold (though the administration has denied that such a mobilization is under serious consideration yet). In short, we now live in an America of the generals and that would be the case even if Donald Trump had never been elected president.

Add in one more factor of our moment: we have the first signs that members of the military high command may no longer feel completely bound by the classic American prohibition from taking any part in politics. General Raymond "Tony" Thomas, head of the elite U.S. Special Operations Command, speaking recently at a conference, essentially warned the president that we are �at war� and that chaos in the White House is not good for the warriors. That�s as close as we�ve come in our time to direct public military criticism of the White House.

The Ascendancy of the Billionaires

As for those billionaires, let�s start this way: a billionaire is now president of the United States, something that, until this country was transformed into a 1% society with 1% politics, would have been inconceivable. (The closest we came in modern times was Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, and he was appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1974, not elected.) In addition, never have there been so many billionaires and multimillionaires in a cabinet -- and that, in turn, was only possible because there are now so staggeringly many billionaires and multimillionaires in this country to choose from. In 1987, there were 41 billionaires in the United States; in 2015, 536. What else do you need to know about the intervening years, which featured growing inequality and the worst economic meltdown since 1929 that only helped strengthen the new version of the American system?

In swift order in these years, we moved from billionaires funding the political system (after the Supreme Court�s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the financial floodgates) to actually heading and running the government. As a result, count on a country even friendlier to the already fantastically wealthy -- thanks in part to whatever Trump-style �tax cuts� are put in place -- and so the possible establishment of a new �era of dynastic wealth.� From the crew of rich dismantlers and destroyers Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet, expect, among other things, that the privatization of the U.S. government -- a process until now largely focused on melding warrior corporations with various parts of the national security state -- will proceed apace in the rest of the governing apparatus.

We were, in other words, already living in a different America before November 8, 2016. Donald Trump has merely shoved that reality directly in all our faces. And keep in mind that if it weren�t for the one-percentification of this country and the surge of automation (as well as globalization) that destroyed so many jobs and only helped inequality flourish, white working class Americans in particular would not have felt so left behind in the heartland of their own country or so ready to send such an explosive figure into the White House as a visible form of screw-you-style protest.

Finally, consider one other hallmark of the first month of the Trump presidency: the �feud� between the new president and the intelligence sector of the national security state. In these post-9/11 years, that state within a state -- sometimes referred to by its critics as the �deep state,� though given the secrecy that envelops it, �dark state� might be a more accurate term -- grew by leaps and bounds. In that period, for instance, the U.S. gained a second Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security with its own security-industrial complex, while the intelligence agencies, all 17 of them, expanded in just about every way imaginable. In those years, they gained a previously inconceivable kind of clout, as well as the ability to essentially listen in on and monitor the communications of just about anyone on the planet (including Americans). Fed copiously by taxpayer dollars, swollen by hundreds of thousands of private contractors from warrior corporations, largely free of the controlling hand of either Congress or the courts, and operating under the kind of blanket secrecy that left most Americans in the dark about its activities (except when whistle-blowers revealed its workings), the national security state gained an ascendancy in Washington as the de facto fourth branch of government.

Now, key people within its shadowy precincts find Donald Trump, the president who is in so many ways a product of the same processes that elevated them, not to their liking -- even less so once he compared their activities to those of the Nazi era -- and they seem to have gone to war with him and his administration via a remarkable stream of leaks of damaging information, especially about now-departed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. As Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times wrote, �For concerned government officials, leaks may have become one of the few remaining means by which to influence not just Mr. Flynn�s policy initiatives but the threat he seemed to pose to their place in democracy.�

This, of course, represented a version of whistle-blowing that, when directed at them in the pre-Trump era, they found appalling. Like General Thomas�s comments, that flood of leaks, while discomfiting Donald Trump, also represented a potential challenge to the American political system as it once was known. When the fiercest defenders of that system begin to be seen as being inside the intelligence community and the military you know that you�re in a different and far more perilous world.

So much of what�s now happening may seem startlingly new and overwhelming. In truth, however, it�s been in development for years, even if the specifics of a Trump presidency were not so long ago unimaginable. In March of 2015, for instance, two months before The Donald tossed his hair into the presidential ring, in a post at TomDispatch I asked if �a new political system� was emerging in America and summed the situation up this way:

�Still, don�t for a second think that the American political system isn�t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state. Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it�s not happening.�

We�re now living in Donald Trump�s America (which I certainly didn�t either predict or imagine in March 2015); we�re living, that is, in an ever more chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent it�s run at all) by billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state. That, in a nutshell, is the America created in the post-9/11 years. Put another way, the U.S. may have failed dismally in its efforts to invade, occupy, and remake Iraq in its own image, but it seems to have invaded, occupied, and remade itself with remarkable success. And don�t blame this one on the Russians.

No one said it better than French King Louis XV: Apr�s moi, le Trump.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

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