Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s an oft-cited quote, but one that is easily forgotten. It seems that the mainstream media is doing to Joe Biden what they did to Jimmy Carter. They are holding Biden to a standard of perfection, rather than what it is reasonable to expect of a well-intentioned human being.

The same holds true for many of the American people. Democrats and Independents alike are characterizing Biden’s first year in the presidency as a failure. This, despite the fact that he has returned civility and level-headedness to the White House and the American economy is rebounding.

When Biden assumed office, he had a favorable rating of over 60%. As he convinced Congress to pass the American Rescue Plan, his popularity remained high. But things changed in August. He decided that he would follow through on Donald Trump’s commitment to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan the end of the year.

Things did not go smoothly. The military of the Afghani government was of little assistance in helping American and other foreign troops and civilians leave the country. This was in spite of the nearly twenty years of training that they had received from the allies.

The final departure was chaotic and involved casualties. Regrettably, that is most of what the media currently reports.

It seems that most of the media quickly forgot what Joe Biden said when he announced that the United States would be withdrawing from Afghanistan. He reminded the press, the American people and the world that he was the fourth president who had presided over America’s presence in Afghanistan. He did not want to hand it over to a fifth president.

Equally important is that Biden was able to leave Afghanistan without declaring victory. Since Vietnam, the United States has been mired in numerous wars where it had little or no chance of actually winning, but that was never officially stated.

Lyndon Johnson was remarkably effective and popular with his civil rights legislation and Great Society. But as the number of troops in Vietnam escalated on his watch from 50,000 to over 500,000, he thoroughly undermined his credibility and effectiveness. He left office partially disgraced and he turned the war over to his successor, Richard Nixon, who was equally ineffective in extricating the United States.

After Nine-Eleven, President George W. Bush led America into Afghanistan. There was a justifiable reason for doing so because the Saudi mastermind of the attacks on the United States, Osama bin Laden, was hiding out in Afghanistan. The United States wanted to bring him to justice.

Bin Laden was finally killed in 2011 in the administration of Barack Obama. But the U.S. did not leave Afghanistan.

Back in 2003, Bush had invaded Iraq for no reason related to Nine-Eleven. He said that there were weapons of mass destruction there, but they were never found. Nonetheless, Bush declared victory. America still has a military presence in Iraq.

By pulling out of Afghanistan, Joe Biden did what Nixon, Bush, Obama and Trump could not do. Yet, when it comes to assessing what he did in Afghanistan, so often he is remembered in the press as Susan B. Glasser did in The New Yorker, “The twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan concluded with an embarrassing and botched American retreat.”

There is not a single American president who has accomplished acts of greatness who did not also make mistakes, serious mistakes, along the way. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but he had also spoken about the best solution to the Negro problem in the United States would be to send them back to Africa.

Woodrow Wilson was the “father” of the League of Nations, but his lack of skill with the U.S. Senate resulted in America not joining.

Franklin Roosevelt shepherded America out of the Depression and through World War II, but was harsh about letting European Jews into the United States and largely tone deaf about racial issues in the U.S.

When a calamity happens on a president’s watch, it not always his or her fault. Jimmy Carter chose to try a military rescue of American hostages in Tehran, Iran, but mechanical problems resulted in helicopters and planes malfunctioning. He paid a terrible price for malfunctions over which he had no control.

Joe Biden did not want America do leave Afghanistan in the way it did. He did not want the Delta variant of COVID to hit the United States in the summer nor the Omicron variant in the winter. It is terribly unfair to blame him for these, but many in the media do so.

Right now, Joe Biden and the Democratic party are what stand between us and a possible destruction of our Democracy by Trumpsters. Give the man a break. All of us, including those in the media, make mistakes or have misfortune fall upon us. Let’s show some tolerance and forgiveness.

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Conventional wisdom says that “in polite company,” we don’t talk about sex, politics, or religion. Of the three, sex is clearly the least comfortable topic to broach.

You see, sex is a ‘hot’ topic; it’s erotic. Some may regard sex as joy; others regard it with shame; and still others with no apparent emotion. While nearly everyone has an opinion about it that does not mean that all are willing to engage in open conversation about sex.

This problem is particularly difficult with the topic of abortion. When abortion is brought up, what is missing is the honesty in the conversation – the honesty about how and why a woman becomes pregnant; what her thinking was before, during and after the act, and how the impregnator (the man) can frequently walk away from an act in which he was either an aggressor or a collaborator or some combination of the two.

Under the best of circumstances, the sex act is a consensual on the part of both individuals. At the time, the two may or may not have desired to pro-create. Under the best of circumstances, this is how the human race commits acts of love and carries on its existence from generation to generation.

But it doesn’t always evolve that way. There are numerous ways for complications or unfortunate circumstances to develop. Following the intercourse, the couple may decide that they are not in love and no longer want to be joint parents to a child.

If both believe in a traditional nuclear family, then the change in their relationship may cause one or both to decide that now is not a good time to give birth to a child. This can be particularly so with the woman who bears major responsibility for the pregnancy and the subsequent child-rearing.

Another dynamic may also be that there are other life changes for one or both progenitors. One is diagnosed with an illness or sustains an injury. It clearly is not a good time to bring a child into the world.

It may also be that as the adults’ lives evolve during the months following the pregnancy, that one or both parties decide that they are not ready to be parents; that they feel a greater compulsion now to pursue a career or avocation. This may seem crass to a strict pro-life advocate, but it is among the myriad of reasons why one or both parties to a pregnancy may want an abortion at a difficult time.

Perhaps the most likely cause of one or both parents not wanting to carry a pregnancy to term is that the process started off informally and then morphed into a “we just want to have a good time” occasion and little or no thought was given to a possible pregnancy during the act of intercourse.

The arguments in favor of abortion for women who have been victims of rape or incest are so compelling that it is hard to fathom why anyone would oppose them. It is often said that many conservatives are mean-spirited; their opposition to abortion following a rape or incest adds clear evidence to that assertion.

All of these reasons are tried and true parts of the ongoing human experience. As you read this, similar scenarios to the ones described above are happening all around the globe, and there is no stopping them.

Because sex is viewed by most as either ‘hot’ or ‘cold,’ most people have reasons to not discuss it in so-called polite company. But it’s too tempting to simply ignore. So rather than pretend that it does not exist, most of us, and especially the news media, either ignore it, or talk about it in code. This is something in which conservatives are exceptionally skilled. They frame issues in a way that do not use literal definitions. Instead, that they are cloaked in verbiage that assuages those conservatives who think that the only way to reference it is to disguise it. They talk about it as life, and what could be more pure. But their big fallacy is that they totally ignore the life of the mother, and the father. The force of the conservatives is so strong that it essentially inundates the mainstream media as well.

Conservatives will continue to dominate the abortion issue and wreak tremendous damage on the civil liberties and economic well-being of non-conservatives. The alternative is for progressives to discuss abortion and sex at the same time, and describe how abortion policy without a realization that “sex happens” will never reflect reality, empathy, and respect for basic civil liberties. Come on, progressives. News organizations now let us use the ‘F’ word as an expletive; why can’t we talk about it for what it really means. It will greatly help the whole country better come to terms with the abortion issue and make more logical and empathetic decisions.

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President Joe Biden did something that his three predecessors failed to do during their nearly twenty years of presiding over America’s longest war. Biden leveled with the American people and told them that the war that they were fighting in Afghanistan was one which they were not going to win. That was Truth to Power, something that rarely comes from the mouth of someone in Power. He said that he was taking action to forthwith remove American troops, contractors and support personnel from Afghanistan.

It was time for a president to acknowledge to American and global citizens that if there had been a good time for the United States to extricate itself from Afghanistan, it would have been shortly after air strikes flattened key Al Qaeda positions in 2002-2003. Since then, any chance of “winning” the war had long since passed. No matter how many corners could be turned in the future, America and its allies were not going to win a war in Afghanistan.

Biden’s willingness to say that the United States was leaving Afghanistan; his courage to follow through on this pledge indicate how remarkable both he and his actions have been. This is particularly so in comparison to American presidents of the recent past.

Biden’s courage to take responsibility for a final resolution of this chapter of American conflict with Afghanistan is the headline. It should remain that way for weeks, months, even years to come. It is difficult to think of any action by any American president since the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson chose to fight for human and economic rights for minorities and poor white people in America that matched what Biden did.

However, as well received as Biden’s decision has been by most of the American people, there has not been a concurrent “trickle down” of support reaching many of the fine men and women in the American media.

No sooner had President Biden delivered his remarkable speech on August 16 than MSNBC cable journalists Nicolle Wallace and Brian Williams agreed that “95% of the American people will love the speech, and 95% of the press will hate it.” Kudos to them for being so spot on and brutally honest about their colleagues in the media.

The response of most of the media to the Biden speeches in many ways reflects the theater of the absurd. Prior to the speeches, if you could have gathered leading media commentators around in an informal gathering and asked them what they would suggest that the United States do about Afghanistan, it almost a sure bet that most would have said that the United States has to get out of Afghanistan. They might further add that the U.S. has to analyze the wars in which it has engaged since its last “victory” in 1945 in World War II and learn how to avoid going to wars which have “loser” written all over them. Finally, should the U.S. once again become involved in a war in which it has no way out other than formally or informally turning tail and leaving, it needs to rehearse Biden’s script on how to say “enough is enough.”

Members of the media seem to suffer from the same malady as other well-educated people who take their particular profession too seriously. Journalists lock themselves into the norms and standards of their profession and remove themselves from the grounding that comes from seeing oneself first as a human being and a reporter second.

No sooner had Biden delivered his seminal speech than they criticized the president with nit-picky questions and comments about the American extrication. There is legitimate grounding to many of their questions, particularly about the strategy and logistics of the final days in Kabul. However, the tone expressed by many of the journalists is snarky and absent of praise for the bold and thoughtful actions taken by Biden.

This is not to imply that no critical questions should be allowed in a press conference when journalists speak “Truth to Power” as clearly as Joe Biden did. Biden spoke the “Truth” about America’s presence in Afghanistan. He may have overlooked some of the smaller “truths” about the difficulties that American forces were facing in the final extrication.

For example, when he stated that there was no way for him and his advisors to know that the Taliban might be able to seize the capital city of Kabul and the area surrounding the Hamid Karzai Airport, that simply does not jibe with the on-the-ground reporting that we have seen and the video that accompanies it. When Biden was not straight about events that both the media and citizens could clearly see, then it undermined the credibility of his assertions about the wisdom of terminating the presence of American troops in Afghanistan immediately.

Media tends to consistently give itself a free pass. This is unfair for so many reasons. When vitriol is directed at Joe Biden as if he were Donald Trump, then the media’s checks and balances on Trump are undermined. The way for the media to enhance its credibility, and to gain more support from the American people, is for journalists to operate as human beings first and reporters second. We tend to admire politicians who speak to us as if they were across the table from us in our kitchen; the same holds true for journalists. The media is the lens through which we learn so much about what is going on in the world, our country, our regions and our localities. No need for grandstanding; just some low-drama honesty and truthfulness.

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Michael Brooks passed away yesterday. A journalist, comedian, podcaster, and socialist thinker, he was one of the most important young voices on the left. His family has listed the cause as a sudden medical condition.

More than just a partisan, he combined his “dirtbag left” aesthetic with segments on world history, Marxist philosophy, postcolonial thought, and more. Michael’s humor, kindness, and charismatic demeanor were disarming enough to introduce many people to important, globe-trotting ideas.

Michael was an uncompromising advocate for democracy and other socialist ideals across the world. This led him to a strong focus on the legally shaky imprisonment of President Lula of Brazil, which allowed for the triumph of the unhinged quasi-fascist Jair Bolsonero. Michael’s coverage of Brazil was more in-depth than most major outlets. While The Economist praised Bolsonaro as a dangerous populist, but one with good ideas on fiscal policy, Michael was uncompromising in his support for Brazilian democracy. Eventually, he was able to interview Lula after his release from prison.

He understood the allure of online right-wing thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Sam Harris to young white men. It was the recognition of the power of this cadre of “Intellectual Dark Web” denizens that led him to produce a short book, Against The Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right. In it, he argued against Peterson’s advocacy of a return to tradition and Rubin’s shallow libertarianism. They focused too much on insular internet arguments and eschewed real-life catastrophes like climate change, autocracy, and inequality. These issues, Michael wrote, were very real and could only be tackled by an international working-class movement for a humane socialist society.

It was this cosmopolitanism, this drawing from sources across the human experience, that made Michael so special. From Brazil to online discourse, from lectures on Cameroonian philosopher Achilla Mbembe to commenting on the latest NBA game, few modern thinkers had his breadth. “he was more intellectually curious than most socialists I’ve met,” said Bhaskar Sunkara in a tribute piece in Jacobin. “Michael was fascinated by the world and by the movements people built to change it.”

He combined this substantial knowledge base with a warmth and understanding of human flaws. Human beings contained multitudes, and therefore deserved forgiveness and understanding.  What was needed, he said, was a mixture of “Machiavelli and spirituality” to tackle the problems of modernity. “He was hungry to cultivate a milieu of people who were both politically committed and loved life,” said Sunkara.

A few weeks ago, Michael joked that he had finished off his bucket list of famous people to interview: Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, President Lula, and more. I’m glad he got to meet his heroes before he passed. Now that he’s gone, I wish I had gotten the chance to meet one of mine.

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As police move in to destroy the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest, it’s worth reflecting on what conservatism is.

British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott likened his creed to a voyage at sea, in which the ship of state has “neither starting-place nor appointed destination…the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel,” he wrote in Rationalism in Politics. It’s an idea not without merit or appeal: The point of politics, it holds, is to keep things functional and well-governed, not to leap desperately towards a utopian society.

Unfortunately, Oakeshott’s metaphor is not what conservatism is.

In 2017’s inaugural address, President Trump said that “Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” Trump promised to reverse these trends, and bring the jobs back. The Republican Party, he promised, was now the party of the American worker.

That’s not what conservatism is, either. So, it’s no surprise that Trump’s administration acts like the Bush II clique on methamphetamine.

On May 25th, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis policeman, killed African-American local George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for close to nine minutes. Floyd’s crime had been to potentially use a counterfeit $20 bill. There are accusations that Floyd might have been drunk or high. None of this matters, of course; he’s dead.

That’s what conservatism is. The defense of the social order at all costs.

Interestingly, unlike past police killings, the president ostensibly disapproved of Floyd’s murder. He’s a “New Republican”, remember. But in practice, this meant nothing. When protests started, he immediately blamed the protestors for things getting out of hand, despite the violence being largely perpetrated by police. He even threatened to send in the US Army, a move that would blatantly violate posse comitatus.

In the early 2000s, conservatism–excuse me, neoconservatism–was mainly focused on implementing austerity and fostering the War on Terror abroad. After the election of Barack Obama, we saw right-wing discourse shift in a libertarian direction. Sales of Ayn Rand’s novels skyrocketed. One would think this would change policy; it did not. When Trump came to power, all pretense of small government was dropped by the man who said he would “bomb the s— out of ISIS.”

One can be forgiven for thinking that things haven’t changed much.

In the 1920s and 30s, when the ruling classes of Europe–the bourgeoisie, the militaries, the clergy–realized they couldn’t beat the Left at the ballot box, they installed fascists, the “New Right”, rather than lose a fraction of their power. In Italy, the king chose to give Mussolini the job after his March on Rome; in Germany, conservative president Paul Von Hindenburg decided to make Hitler chancellor after the Nazis won a plurality of the votes. In Spain, the military, disgusted at the reforms of the left-leaning Second Republic, decided to overthrow the government rather than participate in democratic politics. “LAW & ORDER”, as the president puts it, was more important to conservatives, and some right-wing liberals, than democracy.

This social order in America is of course tied to race. Black people must periodically be reminded of their lack of worth via state violence. These killings make a lot more sense if one views it that way.

This suppression must of course be accompanied by whitewashing in the press if the suppression is to be effective. American freedom of the press’s dark side is the egregious lies the capitalists have told via that same press: William Randolph Hearst’s lie about the USS Maine led directly to the Spanish-American War. During the Russian Revolution, American papers claimed that Bolsheviks were “nationalizing women” to be collectively raped by Red soldiers; it was a fabrication. When socialist novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in the 1930s, Hollywood studios, afraid of losing an iota of profit, hired actors to play Russian caricatures and filmed them saying they’d vote for Sinclair. They filmed hobos and claimed thousands of miscreants were swarming across the California border to get Sinclair’s nonexistent handouts.

The Right’s media infrastructure hasn’t changed, and in 2020 it can still be found lying about the threats to the system. Take the CHOP in Seattle, formerly known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone). Fox News reported a Monty Python reference joke as fact, claiming that a local leader of the protest had become a “Warlord”. In another instance, they posted edited images to portray CHOP as a chaotic hellscape. Actual first-hand reports describe CHOP as a refuge with water, masks, produce, and other necessities freely available for all. The streets and walls are decorated with gigantic, collective works of art, not the entrails of shopkeepers.

In the case of black America, our press is just as likely to fail in what it doesn’t report. Activists have pointed out during this latest round of anti-brutality protests that we only know of the police brutality we see, that we capture on phones. Consider Rahm Emmanuel’s cover-up of a police shooting. Consider the existence of secret police torture chambers in that same mayor’s city. Consider that a black man was found hanging from a tree in Los Angeles and the police declared it a suicide. There have been half a dozen of these hangings over the last few weeks.

Some viewers who saw HBO’s excellent Watchmen show thought that its depiction of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots was part of the comic book franchise’s alternate history. That’s because the horrific event–in which hundreds of black Tulsans were killed by white irregulars, some even flying planes–was suppressed in textbooks for decades. The event was a suppression of a threat to the status quo — the so-called “Black Wall Street” — and the knowledge of such a brutal suppression had to be hidden.

These brutalities — war, racism, beatings, killings, secret police, and the subsequent cover-ups, lying, and suppression of history — are what it takes to keep Michael Oakeshott’s ship of state at an “even keel”. Therefore, draw no distinction between Trump, racist cops, and “honorable” conservatives like George W. Bush, recently rehabilitated by the liberal media. For their mission is to keep the empire and its institutions from changing, and that mission is the true nature of conservatism.

The post George Floyd’s Death Proves There is No “New Right” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The current dust-up between fellow Senators and Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is an ugly thing. It boils down to a private conversation at Sen. Warren’s apartment, where, supposedly, Sanders claimed that a woman could not win the 2020 election. I don’t know the truth of what was said. A misunderstanding is likely. The following piece is not intended as an attack on Elizabeth Warren or her candidacy; she remains my second choice. The real villain of this story is neither Sanders nor Warren, but CNN. And their malfeasance in regard to Sanders and the left as a whole is typical in the American press. I present several instances of this below.

A week after Sanders emerged as the Iowa frontrunner, CNN, an anti-labor network which helped give Trump billions in free publicity, decided to run an unverifiable story a month before the Iowa caucus. All four of the sources they cite are either Warren reporters or heard Sanders’ comment from Warren herself. I do not claim here to know who said what in that meeting from 2018, and I accuse neither senator of lying. But I do know CNN’s coverage of this scandal was among the worst mainstream journalism I have ever seen: At the debate, which CNN themselves moderated, this gem of an exchange occurred:

Moderator: In 2018, you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?

Sanders: Well as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it…In 2015 I deferred in fact to Senator Warren. There was a movement to draft Senator Warren to run for president. And you know what, I said, ‘stay back’. Senator Warren decided not to run and I did run afterwards. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes. How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become President of the United States?[…]

Moderator: Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here. You are saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election.

Sanders: That is correct.

Moderator: Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you that a woman could not win the election? [audible laughter from the audience]

I suspect the laughter was an acknowledgement from the audience of the biased nature of the question. Understandable: It is truly incredible seeing CNN, one of the supposed pillars of American journalism adopting a line of questioning with the same amount of good faith as the phrase, “When did you stop beating your wife?”

A basic proposition: That corporations are self-interested firms that seek to maximize shareholder value. CNN is owned by telecoms giant Warner Media, formerly Time Warner, a regular on the Fortune 500. The Washington Post, as Sanders often points out, is owned by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos. It’s also worth noting that CNN hired a Republican operative with no journalism experience to lead its coverage of the 2020 race. With this ownership and these kind of people in charge of coverage, is it really conspiratorial to suggest that the billionaires’ pet news orgs would lean towards politicians and policies that benefit the wealthy?

It has become increasingly obvious to those of us on the left that the capitalist press will never, ever give the movement for a democratic, worker’s America a fair shake. Certainly, one could be forgiven for thinking CNN was openly taking sides and crossing their fingers for a Trump victory or that of a right-wing Democrat.

While the Warren/Sanders tiff represents the first foray of the Warren campaign into negative advertising against her socialist rival, her surrogates in the media have been at it for months. In October of 2019, a clip surfaced of an MSNBC segment, “The Contenders”, about the Democratic primary. Featuring a speech by Emily Tisch Sussman, Former VP of Campaigns for the Center For American Progress, it touched on Elizabeth Warren’s supposed superiority to Bernie Sanders:

I overheard someone say…basically at this point, if you are still supporting Sanders as opposed to Warren, it’s kind of showing your sexism, because she has more detailed plans and her plans have evolved. I thought it was an interesting point, and I think there may be something to it.

This audio is followed by nods and assents from Sussman’s two male cohosts. This assertion is so emblematic of the liberal press for multiple reasons: One, Sussman, at least in the clip, did not mention that her father is a billionaire, and therefore might have an ulterior motive for trashing his campaign. It’s also worth point out that Sussman’s former employer, the Center for American Progress, recently laid off the entire staff its news arm, ThinkProgress.com, and hired non-union staff. If this doesn’t necessarily serve as an indictment of Sussman herself, it certainly does indict CAP’s ostensibly progressive liberalism. Crush labor, then bloviate on air about the horrors of the Trump administration.

Of course, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention the Gray Lady of liberalism herself, The New York Times. On Sunday they came out in support of not one, but TWO candidates for Democratic nominee: Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. Here’s some choice bits from their so-reasonable-it’s-actually-insane reasoning:

• On Klobuchar and foreign policy: “In 13 years as a senator, she has sponsored and voted on dozens of national defense measures, including military action in Libya and Syria. Her record shows that she is confident and thoughtful, and she reacts to data — what you’d want in a crisis.” Imagine thinking Libya — with multiple warring governments and a thriving slave trade after US missile attacks helped oust Muammar al-Gaddafi — is a foreign policy success. But the Times was a cheerleader for the Iraq War, so this continuation of their hawkish streak is hardly surprising.
• On Bernie Sanders: “we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.” Here we see the galaxy-brained centrists continue their “Trump and Sanders are the same!” logic because they both have passionate fans. As opposed to Hillary Clinton, whose stands were notoriously rational. This is far from new material. Let’s not forget the Center For American Progress teaming up with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute to acknowledge the threat of “populism”. The most concise and accurate refutation to this is by Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone: Bernie and Trump are alike only in that they both frighten the folks at The New York Times.
• On Joe Biden: “The former vice president commands the greatest fluency on foreign policy and is a figure of great warmth and empathy. He’s prone to verbal stumbles, yes, but social media has also made every gaffe a crisis when it clearly is not.” Here we see the media’s continuing refusal to acknowledge or even consider Biden’s declining mental faculties. And where was Biden’s “warmth and empathy” when it came to desegregation? Or his authoring of the now-notorious 1996 crime bill? His militarism abroad?
• Imagine how “realistic” and “pragmatic” it is to choose TWO candidates in a race with no ranked-choice voting. Even if we were to take their endorsement at face-value, wouldn’t they be splitting the vote?

What are we to make of this? For a long time I hesitated on calling out these news outlets, because when they aren’t free-associating, evidence-free, about the left, they do really good work. The New York Times remains a gold standard of American journalism when they decide to do their jobs. Other times they hire Sydney Ember, with only a background in investment banking and marketing, to be their point person on Bernie Sanders.

So how are we to trust mainstream sources when they are corporate-owned and their most popular pundits include such luminaries as Rachel Maddow? Her night-after-night coverage of the Mueller Report, Russiagate, and promises of Trump in prison amounted to nothing except a brief statement from the Justice Department that, yes, the president is legally invincible and cannot be changed with a crime. Cool! Watergate was for nothing! Maddow is also author of Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth, which posits that oil empires helped bring about Putin and Trump. Fair enough. Extraction industries are dirty to the core and gave us such dynasties as the Bushes and the House of Saud. But it’s an oversimplification and one in which she makes some major oversights. Note that she points out the corruption surrounding  Equatorial Guinea’s oil boom but, to my knowledge, does not acknowledge Obama’s friendly dinner party with its fascist president, Teodoro Obiang.

Or Joy-Ann Reid, who, rather than admit she made homophobic statements in the past, suggested that Russia had hacked her blog to make her look homophobic. I, for one, find it difficult to believe that Reid’s show was such a threat to the Russian state apparatus that it would bother with cyberattacks in retaliation.

It’s these brave women that liberals would have us side with against that horrible misogynist, Bernie Sanders.

I should note at this point that this is no apologia for Putin and company. I too oppose Russia’s government. I oppose Putin because his regime is an authoritarian quilt of state, corporate, and intelligence concerns that kills, tortures, and imprisons dissidents, suppresses the poor, supports terrorism, has no concern for climate change, and whose overarching agenda seems to be the maximization of the power of the corporate-state apparatus. Incidentally, these are the same reasons I oppose the United States government.

I would like to conclude by saluting Democracy Now, Jacobin, Means TV, The Intercept, and other left news sources that are building an alternative to the mainstream media. Because it’s become increasingly clear that liberal networks like MSNBC, newspapers like The New York Times, and think tanks like the Center for American Progress have failed to cover left alternatives to the current system responsibly. The have a nasty habit of teaming up with the “responsible” anti-Trump Republicans, and are largely hawkish on foreign policy. In short, these liberals are as much of a facet of the American imperialist establishment as Fox News, the CIA, or the Republican Party. They too must be defeated if we hope to build a better society.

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Something I’m calling “identity journalism” has taken over the Democratic primary debates in 2019. Watching the third in a series of who-knows-how-many “debates” among the many contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, I became aware of something disturbing: The debate moderators—on-air anchors and reporters from ABC News—sorted themselves out into ethnicities and based many of their questions on those identities. Here’s how it played out:

The four moderators were ABC​ News’​ George Stephanopoulos, David Muir, Linsey Davis and Univision’s Jorge Ramos. As the debate [and I use that term very loosely] progressed, Linsey Davis—the African-American moderator—asked the “black questions” about racial inequality, the rise of white supremacy, and institutional racism in America. Jorge Ramos, the Latino moderator, asked the “Hispanic” questions about the candidates’ views on immigration and on Trump’s actions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Stephanopoulous and Muir asked questions that were more “universal,”—the subtext of which is that white is the default, the standard, the non-ethnic.

I don’t know if they talked this strategy over when planning the debate, but it makes me uncomfortable to realize that, apparently, only the black moderator can ask the racial questions, only the Latino moderator can ask the immigration questions, and only the white moderators can ask the “non-ethnic” questions. It’s journalistic stereotyping, and it makes me queasy to watch it.

There’s a similar stratification among candidates and the questions they’re expected to address. Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, almost inevitably through the debates so far, get the racial inequality questions first. They’re people of color so, of course, in the minds of the moderators, they’re the experts on these issues. I’d venture to say that Elizabeth Warren has not been asked very many questions about racial relations, but I’d have to review all of the transcripts to confirm that assertion.

Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro get the immigration questions. Pete Buttigieg gets the “LGBTQ” questions—and gets a special dispensation to answer “racial” questions because of unrest in South Bend, Indiana, where he is mayor. Sanders, Warren, Biden and Klobuchar get the “white people” questions about healthcare, foreign affairs and taxes, and are left on the sidelines of the “ethnic” issues. I’d like to hear more from them about their views on immigration, gun violence and racial issues, and I’d like to hear more from the others about their views on the more “generic” issues. That may happen, but only, I’m afraid when the field has narrowed considerably.

I want to note, also, that the candidates themselves have aided and abetted this stereotyping by staking out territories that distinguish them from the unwieldy pack of nearly two dozen people who initially sought the Democratic nomination. Kirsten Gillibrand billed herself as the feminist candidate. Tulsi Gabbard was the more conservative military veteran candidate. Tim Ryan identified himself as the working person’s champion. Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper and Steve Bullock positioned themselves as the get-it-done governors.

But as the field has begun to shrink, not only are candidates disappearing, so is attention to their self-proclaimed territories fading. With no governor on the debate stage, moderators don’t ask questions about the nuts-and-bolts of governing. In the absence of Kirsten Gillibrand, moderators at the third debate didn’t ask a single question about reproductive rights or Me-Too issues. Unions? Workers? The middle class? No Tim Ryan, so no working-guy questions. And if you’d like to hear candidates’ views on what to do about poverty in America’s “booming economy,” fuhgettaboutit: There’s not a “poor person’s candidate” in sight, so who’s going to bother to ask about that?

We are in desperate times. We need real political debate—not the made-for-tv, 60-second answer, try-to-spark-a-feud, issue-stereotyped game show that we are currently seeing.

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Shuffling through my iTunes library recently, I switched to searching Artist by alphabet mode to help me find a song whose name I couldn’t remember (Song For You  – I know that now.) I knew the song I was looking for was by Rhye. Running down the alphabet list to get to R, I stopped short at B. I had no idea I had so many Bob Dylan songs in my library. I checked. I have more Dylan tracks on my computer than songs by anyone else: 57, as of right now. Of course, in terms of Dylan’s huge output over so many years, 57 is nothing.

I am far from being a Dylan fanatic.

Yes, one of the very first singles that I ever bought was Dylan’s I Want You in 1966 (it’s still in my iTunes library.) I was 16. Prior to that, I remember lying in bed one night and listening to a BBC interview with Dylan and hearing Like a Rolling Stone as it was played for the first time in Britain and Ireland. The song confused my mind state. Dylan was electric, a tempest in a teapot today. But at the time, I felt like I was hearing something that was both immediately defining and predictive all at once. Yes, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who and so many others were putting out new music at just about the same time. But Like a Rolling Stone was different. Like a Rolling Stone broke the mold; it was freewheeling lyrically and musically, completely in control of its own musical space and totally riveting, at least to this 13 year old. Something new was afoot.

But my initial impact with Dylan never turned me into a true Dylan fan. His path and mine diverged. Joni Mitchell arrived. Crosby, Stills and Nash came on the scene. I bought some Dylan albums and rarely played a track back twice other than Sara on the 1976 “Desire” described by Joseph O’Connor in the Irish Times in 2016 as “perhaps Dylan’s most emotionally naked song, as beautiful an expression of the preciousness and frailty of human love as has ever been put on a record.”

 The Vietnam War officially ended in 1975, and we needed a break from the intensity of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Disco arrived, and before we knew where we were, we were somewhere else. Candi Staton, Gloria Gaynor, and Chic took over. We wanted to dance. 1978 brought us Rod Stewart’s If You Think I’m Sexy, and 1979 Cher’s Take Me Home. The tracks, like thousands of others, were vacuous, but they gave us a minute or two metaphorically speaking to catch our breath.

Dylan went on his own way. The 70’s came and went. The 80’s came and went. But Dylan, like the Eveready Bunny, just kept on going. The year 2000 came and went. Dylan kept on making his own kind of music, electric, eclectic, folk rock, rockabilly and blues. His output is remarkable. As of right now, he has released 38 studio albums, 13 live recordings, 19 compilation records, 13 box sets and 13 in the Bootleg series.

If you haven’t given Bob Dylan much attention in a while, take a listen to Sweetheart Like You from the 1983 album Infidels. Or listen to Tight Connection To My Heart from the 1985 Empire Burlesque. Things Have Changed won the Academy Award for Best Song from a Motion Picture in 2001. Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ from Dylan’s 2009 “Together Through Life” is devastating. The video is hard to watch. There is a non-violent version of the video available here. There are certain Dylan songs that I now seem to listen to almost daily; Hurricane (Desire Outtake 1975), with Emmy Lou Harris singing background vocals, is one of those. You’re A Big Girl Now (Take 2), recorded in 1975 but released just last year on The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks is another. The recording and the lyrics are heartbreaking.

 Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast

Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last

… I’m going out of my mind, oh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart

 I respond to Dylan’s Pretty Saro, an English folk song from the early 1700s on many levels; its folk heritage and historic reach. But most of all, I relate on Pretty Saro to Dylan’s singing; his voice is purely emotive, and his sincerity is unassailable. This is the Dylan track that has the most plays on my iTunes play list. The song was recorded in 1970, but not released until 2013 on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10, Another Self Portrait.

In 2015, Dylan shifted the bottom line, once again. He released Shadows in the Night, an album of pop standards from the 50’s and 60’s. It was Dylan’s 36^th studio album. This is the album that brought me back to Dylan. I found Dylan’s arrangements tight and astute, and his assumption of the Sinatra canon somehow authentic and reassuring. And his voice on these songs is richly resonant. Take a listen to Stay With Me. In an interview with Bill Flanagan on Dylan’s official website, this is Dylan’s answer to the question, “If you can sing like that, why don’t you always sing like that?”

 Depends what kind of song it is. “When the World Was Young,” “These Foolish Things,” are conversational songs. You don’t want to be spitting the words out in a crude way. That would be unthinkable. The emphasis is different and there is no reason to force the vernacular. “An airline ticket to romantic places” is a contrasting type of phraseology, than, say, “bury my body by the highway side.” The intonation is different, more circumspectual, more internal.”

He followed up Shadows in the Night with Fallen Angles in 2016, another grouping of pop standards that included Melancholy Mood and Polka Dots and Moonbeams.

Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year of 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Leonard Cohen said, “To me [the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.” Dylan was 75 then. In response to the award, he released a statement announcing that he wouldn’t be attending the award ceremony: “He wishes he could receive the prize personally, but other commitments make it unfortunately impossible.” Dylan was touring.

But Dylan wasn’t done with the standards yet. I Could Have Told You and Stardust are just two of the tracks on the triple CD/ triple vinyl recording Triplicate released in 2017. Triplicate has 30 tracks in all. Take a listen to P.S. I Love You and hear a vulnerability and poignancy that you will rarely hear in Dylan’s own compositions or in any other interpretation of the song, and it’s been covered by many artists including Bette Midler, Billie Holliday and Frank Sinatra. Here’s what Dylan had to say to Bill Flanagan on whether these songs enabled him to go to a place where his own songs couldn’t:

Sure they do. I would never write “Where Is the One,” but it’s as if it was written for me, so I didn’t have to write it. It’s a tough place to get to, it’s vulnerable and protected. You’d have to be like the invisible man to get through, or you’d have to batter down walls, strip yourself naked, and then even if you did get in you’d have to wonder what’s the point. Someone else has been here and gone and took everything. Someone else had to write this song for me. Its nerves are too raw. You leave yourself too open. I’d rather not go there, especially to write songs.

These ultimate Dylan records force us, once again, to reevaluate Dylan, who he has been, what he has contributed and how essential he is in the definition of American musical continuity. Dylan has humanized the standards; he’s taken out the gloss, the stylized 50’s orchestration effects, and brought these songs back to their basics. Along the way, he’s also found a line to connect the music of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s to his own contribution to American musical history that began in the 60’s.

Dylan turned 78 on May 24, 2019

The post Time is like a jet plane: Bob Dylan turns 78 appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Amid oh-so-clever ads for beer, cars and snack foods, one Super Bowl LIII ad stood out yesterday—the sober message presented by the Washington Post: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The ad offers an important counterpoint to the Trump administration’s all-out propaganda war aimed at undermining Americans’ faith in the free press—simply because some media outlets have the audacity to criticize, or simply question, the president and do their jobs of holding government accountable. In an era when the democracy-defining Fourth Estate is under attack by a U.S. President sworn to uphold the Constitution—which guarantees a free press—the Washington Post’s ad rises, essentially, to the level of an act of courage.

Here’s the ad. The narrator, in case you weren’t sure, is Tom Hanks. Call it over-dramatic, if you must—especially in comparison to the humorous, slapstick and feel-good tone of most other Super Bowl ads. But this is a message that needs to be heard and repeated. The words and images are a poetic tribute to a basic tenet of American democracy — freedom of the press: “Knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.”

By the way, it doesn’t ask you to subscribe to the Washington Post. But, given today’s dire circumstances, that’s that not such a bad idea—even if you don’t particularly like Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.

The post Washington Post Super Bowl Ad: A powerful message on freedom of the press appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Nearly one million federal workers are either furloughed or not getting paid because of gridlock in Washington, DC. But this is not normal gridlock where Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided. It is essentially a crisis created by one man, Donald Trump, who refuses to listen to cooler heads in both major parties. He seems to think that he is personally suffering because he sacrificed his holiday vacation to Mar-a-Lago. At the same time, he expresses no understanding that hundreds of thousands of federal workers and many additional federal contractors have seen their economic conditions deteriorate from stable to uncertain to crisis.

How do we know that he does not care about this suffering? Because not once in his more than thirteen-minute speech on Saturday, January 19 did he mention a word about the federal government being shut down and civil servants being out of work. Some among us might have predicted that he would have overlooked what federal workers were experiencing, but it’s doubtful that many would have predicted that one of our major news outlets would have failed to point this out. That is precisely what NBC News did with its Nightly News several hours after Trump’s speech. What’s more, they dedicated a good portion of their newscast to a frivolous story that would have made some of their storied anchors such as Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and Tim Russert turn over in their graves.

The newscast began with several minutes on the weather, and in this case, it was warranted. A major winter storm was crawling its way from the Midwest to the East Coast. Next came the report on Trump’s speech. As I watched, I figured that what he said, and what he did not say, would be put in context because veteran and knowledgeable White House Reporter Kelly O’Donnell was on weekend duty. She has a strong record of not falling for Trump’s distortions.

But between his words and the work of her editor, it seemed as if Trump had made a reasonable proposal and the next step was for he and other Republicans to work out a suitable deal with Democrats. What was not mentioned was that (a) the extension of legal status for an estimated seven hundred thousand young undocumented immigrants and another three hundred thousand refugees would only be temporary, and (b) that Trump not only did not express empathy for federal workers, he did not even acknowledge their existence.

Those gaping holes made an unreasonable man seem almost logical and caring. The bottom line is that there was little or no context to the report. O’Donnell also made mention of what Trump calls the “radical left” without any effort to describe what this largely non-existent and imaginary entity is. To make matters worse, she immediately segued from “radical left” to Nancy Pelosi.

The ultimate transgression was that nearly two minutes of the broadcast was spent on a silly story about how a man in Arizona had been accidentally invited to a bachelor party in Vermont, and the so-called hilarity of the fact that he attended. Was this what the viewing audience needed to hear when there were major omissions in the explanation of the main story?

It seemed as if the network nightly news was imitating a local news program. We’re going in the wrong direction, and we all pay the price.

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