When this hit my feed this morning, I had a moment of OMGyes.
Jimmy Dore on Bernie Sanders and the CARES ActdPlus, the Dems ditch civil liberties.
Matt Taibbi is a second-generation journalist who understands how the machinery of American Empire works–he’s the heir to Hunter Thompson in the pages of Rolling Stone. Katie Halper I know less well, but she’s a lovely Jewish Bernie Bro, and she’s personally responsible, as far as I know, for making Tara Reade’s story relevant to 2020.
Together they host a newish podcast called Useful Idiots, and that where the first link goes. The show often lives up to its name by indulging itself gleefully in distracting trivia, like a recent running gag about Kurt Loder, an ancient MTV host from the glory days of that fallen network, but their guests and interviews are always worth it.
Never more true than this time: enter Jimmy Dore, who you already know if you even click through on a tenth of my spill linkage. JD can always be counted on to outflank everyone else, even Useful Idiots, on the left, which essentially got him fired from the Young Turks in the wake of a profane screaming match with Ben Mankiewicz, who in the context of this anti-mainstream world is the closest thing we have to a right-wing tool; see Blue No Matter Who, which is particularly odious in light of the fact that Ben is a Californian and thus has the luxury of voting his conscience, but still won’t. Or will, which is worse. Anyway.
The giveaways at the start of the crisis were the biggest upward transfer of wealth ever; Fact. And, the people who should have headed it off or at least complained, the Sanders, the Warren, the Squaddies, voted this into existence without any resistance at all.
JD says the country is permanently changed. A permanent underclass. A permanent rolling unemployment. No way out.
His fiercest venom is for the nominal progressives, Bernie in particular, who did nothing but roll over. Matt wants to "explore" this venom. Any Senator can stop a bill and could have stopped the horrific "CARES Act". None did–there are no heroes, no good guys in this story.
Doing nothing besides getting behind Biden is elder abuse, of Biden, besides all the other insane downsides. The only person willing to talk about Joe’s dementia is … Donald Trump.
All Bernie got for six years of running was some "Task Forces", which are completely meaningless–the cream of Bernie’s team (Nina Turner) wasn’t allowed to be on them–nothing was won at all, it’s a puppet show.
JD quotes Norman Solomon, before any of this went down, back when the progressives were doing nothing more than enabling the ongoing security state with their votes in the fall of 2019. There’s no point in voting for ‘progressives’ like those.
JD’s theory is that Bernie’s motivation is essentially to never end up in the position of Ralph Nader, villified as a spoiler. Katie digs in on this.
Aaron Mate’ gets a well-deserved name drop regarding Russiagate, and the interview collectively speculates that three years of the Maddows of the world beating the drum for Russiagate was a deliberately tactical anti-Sanders move. Not sure that matters in the end, but okay. The part of it that does matter is the Manufacturing of Consent, like Chomsky says …
Anti-Trumping is a cottage industry in the media generally. It’s how Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert get their paychecks. Making fun of the village idiot has now officially been done to death, and in the meantime, nobody is making fun of the idiots that somehow managed to lose to him in 2016 (and well may in 2020 too).
Trump marches on, occassionally out-lefting the corporate left. Obama, the Clintons, are not even the lesser of two evils.
Matt says the latest of the ‘gates, Obamagate, is for real and not going away. What that means for Biden is unclear, but not good.
The security state makes up crimes and goes after people with ’em. General Flynn is a perfect example on the right. It happens all the time on the left too. Dissent is managed thus.
The American way of life is being destroyed from within on unanimous votes.
Wildcat strikes are the only options left. Fuck voting, fuck tweets.
Katie steps up to say that Bernie did one good thing, and that was to bring socialist ideas into the mainstream. JD does not disagree, but gives the credit for the to our current reality, not one ineffectual Senator and candidate, and the whole thing sort of stutters to an end on that point.
After they let JD go, Matt muses over whether the Sanders thing might not have been the ultimate exercise in Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, with regard to protest energy. That’s a chilling thought.
And by the way, buy our merch.
Everything that’s good about civilization is in rapid catastrophic decline, just like Nature itself.
In the end there’s still the question of what to do with the time we have remaining to us.
Jimmy and Katie and Matt and Aaron and Kyle are the finest fiddlers around, as the Good burns and drowns.
Even so, I am not motivated by fine fiddling anymore.
Slowly, the question of politics wanes and this more salient existential issue takes on more and more significance.
Even with the insights of Sheldon on death, I still have no better answer than to walk on with my own version of torturing a violin, and trying to keep this central question square in my sights.
The vague notion of approaching death in freedom whispers to me, even though I’m not even sure at times what it really means, or if it’s enough.
For one Saturday afternoon, it must be.