"How come no one told me he was gay!?"

Later …

Oh my god; he refused to shake her hand!
and
Oh my god; she ripped up her copy of his speech!

Later …

Oh my god, Mitt fuckin’ Romney was the only Repub senator who voted to convict!

You know that thing you do where you take off your glasses and pinch the bridge of your nose to indicate that you have pain, and that you can’t take much more?

I’m doing that now.

But …. there is much more

Those two tweets are the meat of Jimmy Dore’s 25-minute consideration of the Iowa debacle and associated shenanigans.

And even though they constitute a nice summation of his summation, they are by no means the whole story. Let’s say that taken together, they’re … oh … 62% of the truth. Maybe we’ll find out more tomorrow. Or the next day. Or never. Just like the results of the Iowa primary.

There was, enough, though, for Michael Moore to issue an alert over the Emergency Podcasting System.

Which is really just Episode 32 of Rumble, but a trope he uses when things are especially dire, like the night we murdered Soleimani and it looked like we were headed into yet another endless war.

This time it really is a war, with PsyOps and everything. The allegedly liberal half of the Establishment is in full freakout mode about Bernie Sanders and all he represents–which basically boils down to the idea that people’s lives are more important than profits.

Quite simply, this has never before been true in this country.

The people for whom profits and the entrenched interests of the ruling class are more important will do anything to make sure it never is.

The stuff with the app is kid stuff, business as usual. John Kerry on the phone trying to figure out a way to stop it is a good image for the next step.

The next step, or the step after … I don’t really even want to think about it. I just hope that Senator Sanders has a really good security team on board, and that their literal powder is very dry indeed.

Michael Moore’s central point in Episode 32 is that we can’t give in to despair and cynicism, even though they are perfectly natural responses to the Way Things Are.

Things are going to get a whole fucking lot tougher before they turn around, if they turn around.

My own central point is better expressed in Episode 31–I listened to that one last night. I recommend it to you as one of the finest chunks of audio I’ve heard in a long while.

In it, MM interviews Naomi Klein. She starts out strong and just keeps getting better the whole way through.

By the end, both interviewer and interviewee are at a very sober and real place.

Ms. Klein points out that we don’t have four more years, to address the deadly existential problems barreling down the track at us.

She says: we didn’t have four years, four years ago.

With that, the tone of the conversation shifts a little, toward that sense of clear-eyed pessimism.

The truth is, we’re already seriously fucked. As a culture, as a species.

This isn’t about the poor polar bears going extinct any more. This is about the rest of the mammals doing the same, including the ones with the overdeveloped frontal lobes and the unique deification of simple and complex greed.

With every day that passes, the odds of a sooner, faster Game Over screen tick upward.

The world puts Greta on the TV, but no one with power is actually hearing the truth coming out of her mouth.

I don’t know how the John Kerrys and Petey Booters of the world live with themselves. The Trumps of the world, the no-homo ex-Pete voters of the world–I can almost have a certain sympathy, for tiny brains damaged beyond saving by the constant pounding of fear.

But I have no sympathy for, can’t even fathom, the smart people who carefully consider, and then place the values of greed above the value of life. Not just for themselves. For you, and me, and their own goddamn spawn. For everybody.

Never before have we been offered a real alternative to their rule.

We have one chance now.

It remains quite a longshot, and it will be opposed vigorously by fit, tan, articulate, prosperous, manicured agents of Satan who have no apparent trouble living a lie, and working to make sure it is believed by people who are none of those things. I’m looking at you, Robby Mook. I’m looking at you, Bezos, Wasserman-Schultz, Zuckerberg.

I don’t have to damn you to hell. You’re doing a fine job of that yourself, and trying real hard to take the rest of us down with you.

One more thing.

An improbable Sanders victory is very far from a magic bullet.

Naomi Klein is very much on target when she says that things are going to get dramatically bad no matter what, and that even average white Americans are going to be faced with situations that question the nature of humanity, of life and death literally, in the coming years.

The title of this movie is Apocalypse Now, and it’s not a metaphor.

The Sanders question is just another referendum on where you stand really.

Which side are you on?