JOHN ESKOW—Every time he dares to ad-lib a single word beyond the mediocre, soul-deadening speeches that some fascist factotum in the West Wing has scripted for him, he’s forced to cobble together some semblance of speech from the pitifully few readymades that he can somehow remember: “that I can tell you,” “strongly,” “special people,” etc. “Special” gets an especially big workout. Veterans are “special.” Cops are “special.” A Playboy centerfold dumb enough to fuck him, and doubly dumb enough to refuse his offer of postcoital cash, is “special.” So many people are special that there’s no one left to be pedestrian.
AMERICAN BRAINWASH
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ANDRE DAMON & JOSEPH KISHORE—In 2003, the Democratic Party supported the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and provided it with the necessary political cover. Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war, employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda.
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ERIC ZUESSE—This plan is moving forward, but nobody can yet say whether, or even when, the US regime will invade. However, the US regime and its NATO allies now also have the excuses that Russia has been holding ‘aggressive’ military exercises near its borders ‘threatening’ NATO countries on its border that might invade Russia, and Western ‘news’media have alarmed their publics against Russia’s ‘aggressive’ moves after its having ‘stolen’ Crimea and ‘attacked’ Ukraine in Donbass.
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America’s Election Meddling Would Indeed Justify Other Countries Retaliating In Kind
20 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Like every single hotly publicized Russiagate “bombshell” that has broken since this nonsense began, Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian social media trolls was paraded around as proof of something hugely significant (an “act of war” in this case), but on closer examination turns out to be empty. The always excellent Moon of Alabama recently made a solid argument that has also been advanced by Russiagate skeptics like TYT’s Michael Tracey and Max Blumenthal of The Real News, pointing out that there is in fact no evidence that the troll farming operation was an attempt to manipulate the US election, nor indeed that it had any ties to the Russian government at all, nor indeed that it was anything other than a crafty Russian civilian’s money making scheme.
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The media and the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories
11 minutes readPATRICK MARTIN—Given that the US government has just issued a series of strategy documents that, among other conclusions, suggest that a significant cyberattack on the United States could justify retaliation with nuclear weapons, the implications of the argument put forward on the front page of the Times are chilling: What cyberattack could be more significant than an effort to hijack the US presidential election?