Are the Oblivious Right?

... We don't have to, we're The Phony Party.

As the press, the CIA and foe news outlets rain a golden shower of misinformation onto our peebrains, I'm reminded of a fact that I've believed in for some timer now, in this Brave New World of computerized everything. Namely, that, far from CCTV being allowed as evidence in a court of law, it should be banned. The reason I believe this is that, given the resources of the State and the inclination of prosecutors to trump up false evidence to convict someone whose guilt they have a vested interest in proving, there is no such thing as a video that can be absolutely proven to have not been tampered with.

I was employed by the computer industry for decades, and there is no better tool (despite the obvious clumsiness of Photoshop hacks) for fabricating evidence that looks damning than the computer.

Trump did go to Moscow. Trump did stay in a room in a hotel in Moscow. That that hotel had hidden CCTV in the room, everyone in Russia already knows. That the Kremlin then had that video doctored, they already know also.

But what Putin is also quite aware of, as, unlike America's, his memory is quite intact, is the way that the GOP turned the nation into a country of babbling baboons bloviating ad nauseum about blowjobs. It then used the power of the Congress to bring the Clinton Presidency to a standstill with nothing more than the (gasp) proof  positive, presented by an obvious slut who saved her cum-stained dress for the specific purpose of indicting her paramour, that the President had extra-marital sex. So Putin already knows that Americans can be easily sidetracked from their most vital national interests if you simply dangle something remotely titillating in front of their sex-addled noses. What poetic justice to do the same to the man who defeated Clinton's wife with a childish prank that uses sex to undermine his Presidency before it evens starts, in the same way that was used against her husband. In no other country could such a tempest in a teapot be stirred up with a scandal so contrived a twelve-year-old could see through it.

He therefore had his national security teams stitch together this absolutely ridiculous 'evidence' and let it trickle out that a dossier on Trump existed, which his security services then allowed to "leak" out, because he knew that, rather than let the buffoon take the orifice of office, a rabid octogenarian Neocon Russophobe like McCain, exhibiting all the telltale signs of an encroaching senility, could easily be duped into believing and releasing as (horrors!) the newest version of trickle down economics: Showers of gold to piston the USA's economic engine into the globe's SupraPower: the world's peenultimate uriNation.

Putin laughs at US intel – “I read all of your instructions!”, he's bragged. He has also scoffed at the adolescent level of US plays on the Chessboard, and, mixing metaphors, of their  penchant to show their already-obvious hand.

But what is apparent to the rest of the world, the USA's so-called Progressive party is blind to. In an hysterical editorial by that self-appointed, unconscionable "Conscience of a Liberal", Paul Krugman, he opined in a diatribe against Bush on April 25, 2005, entitled, "The Oblivious Right", that the GOP believed:

"The economy is in a sweet spot ... conservative pundits talk about a "Bush boom", this despite the fact that the economy is "only fair" or "poor" according to 2/3's of respondents to a Gallup poll. 59% of whom thought the economy was getting worse." He then asks if the administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety is just partisanship. Naturally, he thinks not, it's just that everyone they talk to says so.

The reason? He explains that, "it's quite simple":

"Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns, and corporate interests are doing very well ... The point is that people sense, correctly, that Mr.  Bush doesn't understand their concerns."

How could he?, surrounded as he is by:

"People who have made their careers in the self-referential (or should that be self-reverential?) corporate-sponsored world of" Washington.

He then wonders how,

"... these people ever ended up running the country in the first place."

Why? Because,

"Americans are feeling a sense of dread: they're worried about a weak job market, soaring health care costs, rising oil prices and a war that seems to have no end. And they're starting to notice that nobody in power is even trying to deal with these problems, because the people in charge are too busy catering to a base that has other priorities."

And there we have it, a series of quotes that The Krug uses to blast the GOP in 2005, each of which, word-for-word, can now easily be applied to the Democratic Party and its monumental failure. But rather than admit that they now exhibit every bit of the obliviousness of which they accused the GOP of displaying during the Bush presidency,  they have instead opted to cower behind this ridiculous strategy of dangerously inflaming Russophobic hatred and fear, not even original in its genesis, just rehashed Cold War strategy,  thinking it can camouflage their utter "catering (cratering may be more accurate) to a base that has other priorities", all the while referring to candidate Trump's followers as "Deplorables".

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Even the feckless Bush knew enough to call himself a "Compassionate Conservative", thus assuaging his opponents' anxiety of what he might do once in office. In other words, acknowledging their concerns. Not the Democrats, though. They just give a big finger to the opposition, because they are more arrogant even than Bush.

As Kunstler writes in his post this week,

"What does the Union stand for this time? The rights of former SEC employees to sell their services to CitiBank? The rights of competing pharma companies to jack the price of insulin up from $20 to $250 a vial? The rights of DIA subcontractors to sell Semtex plastic explosives to the “moderate” jihadis of the Middle East?"

Ignoring all of that, Mrs. Clinton saw it more to her advantage to just dismiss the fact that the US is one big Griftopia, and dismiss the concerns of poor Americans (Sorry, you're not my demographic) worried about illegal immigration, despite their having to support, for more than fifteen years now, a Department of Homeland Security that supposedly is paid to keep us, I don't know, is it being too presumptuous?, Secure, yet can't even keep poor, homeless Mexicans, from illegally crossing our borders in order to provide Corporations with an ever-flowing stream of cheap, easily dominated, illegal labor, yet somehow, we're supposed to believe they're able to provide Homeland Security against well-armed, well-funded jihadists? Showing that she not only thinks they're deplorable, but Stupid, too.

So the theme of the moment is that Donald Trump is a bigger crook than the servants and vassals of the Deep State. Who cares? What millions of Americans are feeling is exactly the same thing The Krug said they were more than 10 years ago:

" ... a sense of dread: they're worried about a weak job market" (that's nevertheless hailed as exhibiting strong employment and wage growth; growth so burgeoning the Fed has implemented their baby-step interest rate increases again ... just as they did at the end of the Bush Presidency that likewise was bragging about our "Resilient Economy"),

"soaring health care costs", (worse now, because the Democratic Party pretends they have solved the problem via Obamacare, which, although it may now cover the 20 million lost souls its advocates claim it does, has only served to INcrease the burden on those people actually paying for healthcare insurance),

"rising oil prices" (that have yet to reach a point where the enormously expensive product of the US oil industry can actually pay for the costs to get it out of the ground, processed, and to market without huge government subsidies),

"and a war that seems to have no end" (and that the Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Obama has informed us, will never end. We instead must constantly wage war to maintain the peace),

"And they're starting to notice that nobody in power (ie the Democratic establishment as epitomized by President Obama and Mrs. Clinton) is even trying to deal with these problems, because the people in charge are too busy catering to a base that has other priorities."

Damn. No wonder they have to cast about looking for someone else, creating villains out of doctored Intelligence in order to deflect attention from their total dismissal of the poorest part of the population that the ideals of their Party claim they care about. As Krugman's article so eloquently shows, they're even more blind than The Oblivious Right. So it should be no wonder that half the population feels that there's no choice Left.