The Cast-Iron Heart of Imperalism

Joe Biden's "ironclad support of Israel" has become so mindlessly repetitive, so unthinkingly reactionary, that it is rendered practically meaningless, if not a parody of itself.

Ditto for his hair-trigger response to the anti-genocide protests - that  they are "anti-semitic" to their core.

He might as well be saying that if you don't support Israel's ethnically-motivated right to mass-murder upwards of 30,000 Palestinians, you're simply the wrong kind of racist. It's kind of similar to to what he blurted out during his first campaign:

 "if you don't vote for Biden, you ain't black." The hidden meaning of that taunt, issued to a Black radio host, was that oppressed people will embrace their tormenters if they want to survive in the prison-industrial complex that he himself had been so instrumental in creating. 

All the racist tropes in the world can't keep up with Biden. He is getting so desperate he spun a yarn last week about his uncle possibly being killed by cannibals on Papua New Guinea during World War II.  He might have been thinking of cartoon characters with a human bone through their noses who kidnapped and devoured all those brave white settler-explorers in the jungle back in the day.

 If you can't have a heart of darkness to go along with your ironclad mania, then what good are you as an overlord?

And why did he settle for the retrograde "ironclad" loyalty to an apartheid regime? After pocketing millions of dollars from the Israel lobby over the course of his 50-year political career, iron is so stingy.  Why not upgrade to "tungsten steel-clad" or better yet, "diamond-clad" loyalty? Those are materials which unlike iron, can never rust.

 the Biden regime's use of the ironclad metaphor is not only cheap, it's getting downright flaky, not to mention riddled with holes. A lot like whatever passes for their ancient, rust-eaten brains. 

Meanwhile, although regular people have been massing in the streets for more than half a year in support of the Palestinian people, the New York Times and other mainstream outlets were not covering these events with any regularity. Not, that is, tuntil they converged on elite college campuses, especially the campus of Columbia University in New York City. The biggest media personalities are in town anyway, covering the Donald Trump trial. You will be relieved to know that this hush-money trial is the lead story, despite rumors of World War III already breaking out. Forget Joe Biden's pig-iron brain. Donald Trump is so old and decrepit and sociopathic, they'll have you now, that he keeps nodding off after lunch right in the middle of the trial of the century.

Trump is so guilty in fact, that the Los Angeles Times spotted him emerging from O.J. Simpson's prison cell during the writing of the their O.J. obituary last week.

 suffice it to say that we probably never would have learned about the self-immolation of Max Azzarello had it not happened right outside the Trump courthouse in full vew of the TV cameras. Of course, when it turned out that the victim was not a Trump supporter, they lost interest as soon as was indecently possible.

If you feel like you're trapped in a Theatre of the Absurd, you are not alone. Only in a world this topsy-turvy would the genocidal Israeli prime minister Netanyahu accuse the Biden White House of "the peak of absurdity and a moral low," for merely considering the sanctioning of a particularly brutal IDF battalion indulging in non-sanctioned genocide in the occupied West Bank. Bibi definitely got the absurd part right, given that the US just voted to give more unconditional aid to Israel.

"The horror! The horror!" -- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

The November Lottery: A Boycott, Divest, Sanction Scenario

When six white Western aid workers and their Palestinian driver were droned to death by Israel in Gaza last week, Joe Biden was so livid that he got right on the horn with Bibi. It turned out that the dead workers were employees of a wealthy personal friend of his. 

Joe has frequently dined at his high-end restaurants and had even appointed him to lead a White House nutrition council.

And just like that, Netanyahu withdrew his troops from the section of Gaza territory that his troops  were occupying and destroying. Biden had finally threatened to stop sending him the American weapons and ammunition that are so essential for the continued genocide of Palestinians. 

The deaths of six white Westerners with connections to a wealthy mover and shaker within Biden's own Beltway Bubble moved Biden like the deaths of more than 32,000 Gazans had not. After all, Palestinians all look alike to Biden.

He as much as admitted this fact to a Muslim doctor he'd invited ibto his inner sanctum to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast. She had shown the president photos of injured  starving Gazan children in an attempt to move him. But all that he muttered in response was "I've seen those."

As the physician later told NBC News, however, this would have been impossible,  since they were private unpublished pictures she had taken herself. 

They all look alike to Biden because he is a racist, unable or unwilling to see the humanity of children with a darker skin color than his own. The Gaza genocide itself is the extreme manifestation of a global racialist capitalism, which grows and grows even to the point tof its own extinction, by extracting wealth and even life itself from various populations in the Global South. 

So how long will this de facto "truce" last? Some say Israel is only regrouping and preparing for a final assault in the south of Gaza, where more than a million refugees are trapped. 

Through  their favorite New York Times mouthpiece, Zionists say they fear that even Bibi's temporary acaquiescene to Biden's selective rage will lieave Israel vulnerable to attack by Hamas or even directly by Iran, in retaliation for its bombing of its embassy in Syria. Perhaps the embattled Netanyahu is even hoping for another  epic attack on his own people  thus giving him all the justification he thiks he needs to wipe out the entire Palestinian population with the help of those 2,000-pound American bombs.

Speaking of the New York Times, the paper of record devoted the prime upper left real estate of its digital front page Sunday to the plight of Biden and other Democrats who are finding no peace of their own, thanks to the thousands of protesters converging on their high-dollar  campaign events and even in front of their own luxurious homes. The way the Times frames it, you'd think that verbal attacks on these politicians and the inconvenience caused to their families are worse than the assault on Gaza itself. Protesters even poured buckets of fake blood on the heavily armed chauffeured car of the Secretary  of State himself!

The not-so-subliminal message in the Times piece is that if Biden loses to Trump n November, it will be the fault of the protest movement. The Times even grouses that the protesters are not also showing up at Trump campaign events- as if supposing that The Donald is also sending bombs to Israel despite not currently being in power. Maybe he stashed some ammo at Maga-Largo along with all those top-secret purloined papers.

Buried deep within the Times article is the chilling revelation that the Biden campaign and/or the FBI are screening the social media accounts of all the ticketholders to his campaign events. Several people were denied admission to his Radio City extravaganza because they were deemed to be anti-genocide threats. One elderly ticket holder, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, was escorted from the premises to that the Biden people called the "Solutions Tent" to get an explanation. All decisions to admit or not to admit, were of course Final.

But the suppression of protest by this division of the Censorship-Industrial Complex was not entirely foolproof:

One protester, Hannah Ryan, 33, a photographer from Brooklyn, said she had been flagged by the campaign, asked a battery of questions about people she knew and how she had acquired her ticket, and had then been allowed in. She shouted at Mr. Obama, who told her and other protesters, “You can’t just talk and not listen.”

The Times omitted the  last part of Obama's retort,  when he scolded that people who rudely interrupt their betters and speak out against genoicde are behaving just like "the other side." He is still operating under the delusion that people primarily identify themselves as members of a corrupt duopoly. If the Times had completed the quote, it would not have been a good look for him, comparing lefty protesters to right-wing rudeniks  at Trump rallies. It would only have highlighted the thoughtless Manichean mindsets common to politicians whose whole reason for being is to serve the 'rules-based order" - their euphemism for the reign of voracious, predatory, unfettered global capitalism. It would have exposed Obama's insistence that bland civility is the very essence of democracy to be the fraud it always has been. His  attempted repression of public voices is rapidly losing its overhyped "rock-star" punch -  if it hasn't collapsed from the cloying weight of its own hot air already.

Thus are Democrats beginning to openly avoid the public sphere,  because they fear the public. If Trump wins in November, he too will fear the public. And this "public" will have nothing to do with the phony bourgeois pro-Hillary "pink pussyhat" crowds  hurling invective at him from their tony neighborhoods. Hillary Clinton herself was heckled by savvy students at her Wellesley alma matter over the weekend. They correctly pointed out that her neoliberal brand has aided and abetted the mass murder of women in Palestine.

Like Obama, Clinton is so arrogant that she she doesn't seem to realize that telling protesters to "get over yourselves" on the Jimmy Fallon talk show is not a winning strategy for getting Biden re-elected.

Since voting for either Biden or Trump this November is providing the neoliberal capitalist world order the fig leaf of consent for its continued oppressive rule, I won't be   partaking in this fraud at all, unless it is to vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West. A vote for Republicans or Democrats or even RFK Jr. is essentially a vote for the militarized world banking system and transnational corporations. These are the entities profiting from plunder and genocide in all their varieties. The politicians we elect are simply the middle-men and women acting as financialized capitalism's buffer zone.

So my vote is for the brave protesters making both the oligarchs and their political lackeys so uncomfortable and feeling more vulnerable than they're used to. That is why they are lashing out at us and attempting to censor us.

We are at a time of great crisis and a time of great change. Fighting for Palestinians is a fight for ourselves. Now that more and more people, especially the young, are realizing that capitalism  itself is the real monster behind the evils of the world, the many will find the wherewithal to defeat it and the  precious few corporations and billionaires currently at the increasingly uncontrollable controls.

Socialism is no longer a dirty word, especially for the young and the downtrodden. That is what gives me such hope.

Angels and Demons Come Out To Play

 Former President Barack Obama compared anti-genocide protesters to rude Trump supporters Thursday night as they repeatedly interrupted him and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton at their $26 million schmoze-fest as Radiio City Music Hall.

As one audience member shouted that they have blood on their hands, Obama - rather than addressing the accusation or defending himself and his two fellow war criminals - scolded: "You can't just talk and not listen. That's what the other side does."

 This was according to a press pool report of the paid-admission-only event, where the cheapest nosebleed seats went for $250 and where  even remotely accessing to the live-stream cost viewers $25. 

According to Obama, no matter how outrageous the behavior of their leadesrs may be, now matter how much death and destruction these powerful leaders spread throughout the world, the only permissible response of the citizenry is abject silence. Protest is not civil, and civility trumps everything else. If you want to be a loyal Democrat more than you want to be a free-thinking humanist, then you will pretend that Clinton, Obama and Biden are angels and that it is only the "other side" (Trump) who is the demon.

The Catholic Marxist critic Terry Eagleton had Obama and Company absolutely pegged when he wrote in "On Evil" that

"The United States, unusually among nations, is angelic and demonic at the same time. Few other nations combine such high flown public rhetoric with that meaningless flow of matter known as consumer capitalism. The role of the former is to provide some legitimation for the latter....

"Rather as Satan combines angel and demon in his own person, so evil itself unites these two conditions. One side of it - the engelic, ascetic side, wants to rise above the degraded sphere of fleshliness in pursuit of the infinite. But this withdrawal of the mind from reality has the effect of striking the world empty of value. It reduces it to so much meaningless stuff, in which the demonic side of evil can then wallowl"

This is another way of puttinng the specious "lesser evil" rationale for holding one's nose and voting for Democrats rather than Republicans, who more verbally and loudly  wallow in the dark side.

That Obama would attempt to silence a person speaking out against the US-financed mass murder and starvation of 30,000 Palestinians is just one more indication of his being, as the late Glen Ford posited, the more effective evil."

While Donald Trump wallows in his own assigned role of being the devil incarnate, sacrilegiously selling $60 Bibles to defray his legal expenses while his slimy son-in-law Jared Kushner openly scopes out Gaza oceanfront property to add to his real estate portfolio. the Democrats chide Israel in public even as they finance its genocide, thus making all of Jared's obscene dreams come true, sooner rather han later.

Not that Joe Biden is above self-deprecatingly embracing his demonic "Dark Brandon" persona. Last Saturday, to mark "National Puppy Day," his campaign was marketing blankets emblazoned with the cartoon image of Biden with glowing read orbs in place of eyes.  I guess the idea is to toughen up all those whimpering little doggies out there so they can grow up to be just like Biden's German Shepherds and get away with two dozen biting incidents before finally being banished from the White House.

And nothing screams "Get Off My Lawn!" to disrespectful protesters and annoying neighborhood kids like a yard sign featuring a smalevolently grinning Joe Biden decked out in red aviator sunglasses.

They're even selling a Joe Biden coffee mug whose eyes glow bright  crimson as soon as you pour hot liquid into it. Because, folks, Biden is red hot and Donald Trump is nothing but a limp white fleshly noodle with less of a campaign war chest than Biden.

For some mysterious reason,  I have been getting five or six spam emails every day from the Biden campaign. This is because, the Act Blue money laundering outfit explained, I had supposedly donated to Democrats in the past. But since they only have  my email address and call me "folks" or "friend"  - or when they come from Obama a derisive but very cool "Hey!" - instead of by my name, this is an obvious con. The last politician I gave money to was Bernie Sanders, back in 2016 when I still believed in him, so they could have gotten it from him. 

I have not unsubscribed because I was curious about the "messaging" to voters. These fund-raising appeals to "grassroots voters like me" have one main theme. Give $3 or $25 or buy some Biden bling. It is the only way to keep Trump out of the White House. The spam contains nothing about what Biden wil do for you to make your life better. A few of them did offer a chance to win a ticket to Radio City Music Hall, if I would fork over $25 first.

Other than that, it's all about the fear and fomentation of same just in case you haven't  developed it independently yet. Their records also show I have not yet contributed, although 239 people in my town did, today alone! I should be ashamed, not to mention feeling left out of the in-crowd.

They are asking people to hop on the money bandwagon in support of a cartoon character with a cynical grin and glowing red eyes. And if I don't, Trump will win, and it will be all my fault.

Fortunately for me and I suspect for many others,  these political marketeers are themselves the cartoon version of the nuns in my Catholic School, who were much more effective gaslighters.

And unlike the mass protests of Occupy Wall Street and the protests against the George Floyd murder, neither Democratic nor Republican politicians have yet found a way to co-opt the anti-genocide protests. They can't very well do photo-ops with their own victims. These mass killers and career warmongers are not about to co-opt either themselves or the predatory capitalists that they work for.

Saving Democracy By Killing It

The New York Times reports that the Biden administration is dispatching a whole "army of lawyers" on a special mission to aggressively seek and destroy any and all challengers to the unpopular incumbent's continued reign in the White House.

What - you still thought that democracy included giving voters an actual choice on Election Day? To the contrary. Anybody still operating under the delusion that our form of government is anything but a fascist oligarchy should be getting a cruel wake-up call with this latest news. Not only are they acting like the dictators that they accuse Donald Trump of wanting to be, they are flaunting their own authoritarianism right out in the open. No matter to them that they are also flaunting their abject fear of the voting public right out there in the open.

Not for nothing does the Times headline characterize such anti-genocide candidates as Cornel West and Jill Stein as "threats" - literal enemy combatants of the World Order.

These and other upstarts are, according to the article, "peeling away" votes that Joe Biden presumes that he, and he alone, rightfully owns. If this tired old flaying-alive nonsense doesn't plant an image in your head of a puckered rind being pulled off an old lemon whose pulp is revealed to be covered in toxic mold, then I guess you're not as much into horror as I am.

According to one of Biden's lawyers, the aim of the anti-peeling op is to police the usurpers and pretenders to ensure that they are playing by such rules as jumping through all the artificially narrowed ballot access hoops in the proper, normative order. If they should accidentally graze the top of the pole vault bar with a pinky finger, or trip over one of the many tripwires that the corporate Democrats have placed on the obstacle course, "we will hold them accountable."

Or as the Times more primly puts it, 

Gaining access to the presidential ballot is a complicated and expensive process for candidates, particularly for those not affiliated with a party, even a minor one. Laws vary from state to state, with some requiring merely a fee or a few thousand signatures, and others requiring tens of thousands of signatures gathered under tight deadline pressure, along with other administrative hurdles.

The lead legal warrior trying to purge the ballots of all challengers is former White House Counsel Dana Remus, currently a partner in the Covington and Burling white-shoe law firm. She is married to a State Department undersecretary for security who previously ran financial security for the Capitol One bank. Remus once clerked for right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade last year.

When, several years prior to that notorious ruling Alito was accused of misogyny by columnist Dana Milbank for allegedly making mean faces at the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg behind her back, Remus defended him against the charges of sexism, gushing in a letter to The Washington Post that her former boss "is a good man, who serves every day with humility, dedication, and incredible intelligence and insight."

It's really incredible how misused and overused the word "incredible" has become in polite, fawning discourse.  Whenever I hear it uttered by a famous or powerful person, my bullshit detector goes into full gear. An alternate interpretation of Remus's statement is that Alito's alleged respect for women and his integrity and brains are beyond belief. Her glib statement is simultaneously meaningless and non-credible. Ditto for the projectile belching of all the U.S. politicians and media stenographers who regularly proclaim themselves "unbelievably heartbroken" about the genocide in Gaza.

The State of the Union Is Deranged

 Joe Biden wasted no time setting the belligerent, paranoid tone in his State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night.

"Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop in Ukraine, I assure you he will not," he thundered.

Whereupon his fellow belligerents erupted in cheers and thundering applause. You might have gotten the impression that they were cheering for Putin. They were definitely cheering for World War III, as Biden hearkened back to the good old days when Adolf Hitler brought the whole country together and the war economy boomed, putting the final nail in the coffin of the Great Depression.

Biden's theme of the night is that fascism is coming to America in the form of Donald Trump. So it was all the more grotesque when he strayed from his script in an attempt to out-Trump Trump on the border crackdown.  If he can't beat the Republicans at their own bigoted game, then he will join them. In fact, he will outdo them in his fear and hatred of the Other.

He certainly proved his tough-guy right-wing mettle Thursday when he engaged with Marjorie Taylor Greene. He certainly shocked a few liberals when he called the alleged Venezuelan killer of a young U.S. woman an "illegal." It was especially jarring when he promptly returned to his script and pronounced himself disgusted that Trump had accused migrants of "poisoning the blood of America." 

He, Joe Biden, respects the humanity of those dastardly illegals!

So that "gaffe" didn't prevent the media from praising his performance. He was totally on fire. He was feisty and he was folksy. He was Joe Being Joe! These are just the kind of qualities required when telling a litany of lies about how great America is, and how "heartbreaking" it is that Israel is using Biden's love-bombs to actually kill people.

Like the fairytale ogre who fattens up his victims before slaughtering them, Biden announced at his stand-up routine he is sending a military flotilla to the coast of Gaza in order to build piers for the offloading of food. Since he is simultaneously sending hundreds of bundles of ammunition and other deadly hardware to Israel - arriving at lightning speed compared to his food delivery stunt - it will be such a tragedy when the starving Palestinians who are still alive at that point will even have the strength to crawl through the rubble to get at the supplies. 

One even wonders if the Israeli armed thugs posing as an army will shoot at the ships and US troops to prevent the aid from being delivered. One also wonders whether Joe Biden will nevertheless still defend Israel's right to "defend" itself.

"History is watching" was the refrain Biden kept bellowing out during the speech. History was watching then, it's watching now, and it will watch in the future. This is not surprising when you consider that Historian-For-Hire Jon Meacham reportedly composed much of the speech.

Because of the Standardized History Bible, Biden was also able to preposterously declare that the Capitol riot of January 6th was the darkest American day ever. It has apparently supplanted Nine Eleven as the greatest holy day of paranoid apocalyptic obligation. 

But miracle of miracles! History has further decreed that even though Donald Trump (whom he did not name) is the greatest threat to America, America has enjoyed such a recovery that people don't even realize it, until Joe Biden, or Meacham, dubs his presidency " the Greatest Story Never Told." Historical Revisionist-in-Chief Joe Biden declared that despite the fascist threats both abroad and at home and existing in his own administration, America has never been better.

I won't bore you with his whole litany of lies, such as his boast that he cut child poverty in half. He did not mention that child poverty has actually increased since the expiration of Covid-era social spending legislation. To that end, he modestly vowed that every child in America will learn to read by the third grade.

The third grade? What a modest, all-American goal. Is History watching or even paying minimal attention to the gibberish flowing from Biden's lips?

What Biden could have meant was that he hopes every American will continue to read at a third grade level for the rest of their lives. That way, neither they nor History will notice all of the political gaslighting going on. They will also lack the skills to read any of Meacham's hagiographic history books. 

You Can't Reform Capitalism

Instead, if you're an unpopular neoliberal president running for re-election, you will at least want to be seen as trying . Therefore, in lieu of winning hearts and minds by changing his own mind about Medicare For All, Joe Biden cynically aims to make you forget all about his old campaign promise to at least include a public insurance option in his health care agenda, Who needs that sort of namby-pamby consolation prize when you can join him in privatizing Medicare and Medicaid by calling it an all-out war against greedy corporations?

Since Joe Biden prides himself on being an absolute killer of a genocidal wartime president, the least he can do for the folks back home is to get the eugenics craze up and running at full speed. The fact that his Centers for the Prevention of Disease Control just officially made the Covid  isolation protocols go away, Biden will make it opaquely plain at this Thursday's State of the Union speech that he aims to transform your health care into a full scale cutthroat competition You see, the problem with the American health care industry is not that it's even called an industry instead of a universal program for the public good. It's not that even insured citizens are going bankrupt at record numbers when they get sick. It's not the unaffordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles..

It's that the government-subsidized insurance behemoths should be fighting more among themselves for every last denial of benefits and every last nickel that they steal from your pockets.  

As reported by Politico, Joe Biden will use part of his State of the Union speech this Thursday to announce the creation of a (drum-roll, please) brand new Task Force to study  and root out the roots of the corporate greed they apparently have only recently discovered exists in this country. 

This task force is the next best thing and the only alternative to single payer, government-run medical insurance. The idea is that once Biden's task force studies the problem, it will then have the chops to gently chide the insurance predators into  playing in a new Free Market Olympics for the fostering of capitalistic good will and understanding on the killing fields. Which team will have the best results in narrowing provider choice and cutting costs (and services) in the end? Citizens will root and cheer and vote for Team United Health Team, Blue Cross and all the others.  Which team can valiantly raise the bar on the pole vault and make it harder  to give fans the care they need? If life can't be a constant battle, then what good is it?  

From Politico's breathless preview:

The move comes as President Joe Biden seeks new ways to show voters he’s cracking down on the so-called corporate greed that he has increasingly blamed for high prices — a message he is expected to highlight during his State of the Union address on Thursday.

Biden’s approval ratings on the economy have been dragged down by voters’ concerns about the rising cost of living despite the otherwise robust post-pandemic recovery. And a recent KFF poll shows that 80 percent of voters say it is “very important” for candidates to talk about health care affordability.

Since the person whom Biden is tasking to lead the force also heads the HHS division orchestrating the stealth privatization of Medicare by insurers under the "advantage" rubric,  one wonders if this allegedly novel ask Force is simply another way of putting lipstick on a pig. When Biden calls them greedy, he means it as a Gordon Gekko-like compliment.

And don't look for Biden to issue a price control  or freeze order, either. The problem is not high prices at the grocery store, or rising rents, you see. The problem is a lack of transparency from grocery chains and landlords. If they were only more honest about the many ways that they cheat and bilk you, you would be satisfied, according to the Biden White House.

These are not only supremely stupid people, they think you are as supremely stupid as they are. But look over there: Biden is dropping a few surplus meals-ready-eat packages for bthe starving Palestinians to compete for. He is only trying to bring free market competition into an open-air prisonm after all.

R.I.P. Aaron Bushnell

 Maybe if U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell had set fire to the Israeli embassy instead of setting fire to himself, his act of protest against the genocide in Gaza would have gotten more attention  from the establishment media machine. As it was, the first instinct of a cop arriviing on the scene was to draw his gun instead of grabbing a fire extinguisher or a blanket with which to smother the flames. I guess the cop feared that without gunfire,  the fire might spread to some pretty valuable real estate in the vicinity.

The police reaction and the ensuing media silence on this tragedyare simply reflective of the fact that the the powers-that-be consider the destruction of property to be far worse than the destruction of human beings.  This also applies to the destruction of oneself in an act of political protest.

 And when it's a military service member who self-destructs so spectacularly to protest against a genocide in which he potentially would be ordered to participate ,it renders thr masters of war and their media lackeys completely speechless.  Their own cowardly acts of self-censorship speak for ithemselves; to the extent that outlets like the New York Times have covered the tragedy, they have done so in as perfunctory and repressed a style as they can indecently manage.

 "Man sets self on fire in front of embassy " is pretty much the gist of it. It's rendered as pathetically humdrum a stunt as the  latest disturbed White House fence-jumping or at least no more remarkable than a particularly gruesome traffic pile-up.

"Move along, folks," the media cops on the beat seem to chide those rubbernecker readers. "Nothing to see here."

It's especially awkward for them as Election '24 is in full gear. Genocide Joe would find it especially difficult to shamble up to eh podium and slur out his thanks to Airman Bushnell for his service and his sacrifice. And his standard closing line of "God protect our troops" would neither fit the occasion nor contribute to the kind of  for-profit patriotic fervor that he's always aiming for. 

And it also wouldn't do for Biden to bring up suicide of any kind during this election year, when deaths of despair in America are at their highest level in years -  despite his boasts of  an economy so booming that only MAGA Republicans are mired in the slough of American life,. They are so cynical when  a Democratic future obviously beckons to one and all.

To hear the politicians tell it, our military heroes and martyrs have all willingly and valiantly killed or died for us. Never do the masters of war tell us the real truth: that the vast majority of people join the military to escape poverty, either actual or threatened. That is because wages have been stagnating for decades. A military job means guaranteed food, lodging, job training and guaranteed, cost-free health care.  Recruiting efforts, largely done in high schools in poor districts, take great care sell the benefits and to downplay the physical and mental risks.

The first place I learned about Aaron Bushnell's death was in the right-wing, sensationalistic Daily Mail. The headline in its follow-up story today was. predictably enough, aimed at arousing outrage against lefties burning Israeli flags in a vigil outside the embassy, and glorifying the airman as a martyr. It is the same kind of stereotypical language the media uses when they cover Muslim jihadists fomenting mayhem in the Middle East just for the crazed fun of it.

But surprisingly enough, the body of the Daily Mail article contains interviews with Bushnell's neighbors and plenty of background and photographs.  Even though it's buried deep within the body of the story, it even quotes a psychologist warning that to the extent that the establishment media will cover the self-immolation in any depth, it will be a smear job, calling into question Bushnell's mental health. Absent any radical tidbits, The Times and its cohort  probably will continue to ignore the story.

Besides, they're too busy covering Joe Biden's campaign appearance on a late-night NBC talk show while studiously ignoring the scores of anti-genocide protesters gathering outside 30 Rock. They're too busy analyzing whether Joe's genocide will hurt his chances in today's Michigan primary - where, we're told, only his victory will prevent the Second Coming of Trump.

They figure if they just ignore Bushnell's death, it will go away. So let's make it impossible to ignore. Otherwise, his death will indeed have been in vain.