Great Moments in Media Muppetry: A Whole Jamil of Beans

 

Editor's note: so as I mentioned the other day, I'm bringing "back" a blogging-style variation on a popular feature I used to write over on ninaillingworth.com called The Wall of Shame. The twist is that rather than take-down pieces and tweet collections I'm randomly preserving evidence of media muppet headassery, one online clusterf*ck at a time. Is that petty as f*ck? You betcha, Sparky.

Typically these will just be quick blog posts with screenshots but let's just say today's subject inspired me to get a little involved and ended in this short, heavily sourced essay. I'm not saying you *have* to click on the links in this article to enjoy this piece, but today's serving of beef will certainly be more delicious if you do. 

Let's get down to business, shall we? 

A Whole Jamil of Beans

With the realization that Downmarket Mussolini's half-assed "chicken coup" has finally ground to an unofficial halt, the online discourse is turning towards discussions about Joe Biden's cabinet nominees or potential nominees and it's going just about as well as you'd expect - it's a travshamockery. 

While articulating the full contours of that debate would be beyond the scope of this piece, the basic gist of the controversy is that after relying on the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party to carry his decaying mummy carcass over the line against Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Joe Biden is currently shutting out qualified progressive candidates to stack his cabinet with corpse merchant lobbyists, investment bankers, and free market fundamentalists; a series of decisions that are highly unlikely to be popular with voters in general. Naturally, while progressives and the larger American left are by no means surprised at this development, they're certainly not pleased with Biden's completely predictable betrayal and many influential voices are speaking out against Palooka Joe's new pack of minions.

In response, someone has clearly given the Neoliberal Discourse Defense TeamTM marching orders to defend Biden's picks at all costs; with results that run the full gamut between farcical and Orwellian. Of course, all of that might sound like a conspiracy theory, but thanks to Clinton campaign emails published by Wikileaks and David Brock's big fat mouth, we already have a pretty good idea that this sort of thing goes on all the time. Now obviously I don't have the time to fish out dumb tweets from every blue-checkmarked lackey working in the Dem-Booster Bullsh*t Factory, but even just a cursory examination of headlines in the mainstream and faux-progressive media is fairly instructional here:

Joe Biden’s Cabinet Picks Send a Clear Message: The Adults Are Back in Charge
Here Come the Adults: Biden’s Cabinet is shaping up to be everything that Trump’s was not
Biden’s Cabinet is ‘delightfully boring.’ Can reality-TV-addled America deal with it?
Biden's dull-by-design plan
Kelly Evans: Boring Is (Hopefully) Beautiful
Analysis: Biden prioritizes experience with Cabinet picks
'A cabinet that looks like America': Harris hails Biden's diverse picks
Joe Biden nominates first woman to lead intelligence and first Latino to head homeland security
Republicans Are Really Trying to Argue That Biden's Cabinet Picks Are Corrupt
Biden keeps the peace with first Cabinet picks
Biden Cabinet picks largely unify Democrats — so far
Progressives Can’t Find Anyone in Biden's Cabinet to Be Mad About—Yet

Progressives Cheer Joe Biden's First Round of Cabinet Picks: 'A Great First Step'

Whew, that is certainly quite a lot of bullsh*t; I'm particularly impressed at the bold declarations that progressives have no issues with Biden's cabinet in light of the numerous linked examples I featured above, showing prominent progressives being actively pissed off by those picks. This is all very interesting and you could reasonably infer quite a lot about how power networks manipulate political propaganda in the American discourse just from clicking most of the links above; but ultimately the Biden Cabinet fight between neoliberals and progressives is only the backdrop in our story - the tableau on which our tale of flak goblin dipsh*tery plays out if you will.

That's because, as it turns out there is one potential Biden cabinet nominee too odious for even some portions of the braying Biden booster bunch - bawh gawd, is that Rahm Emanuel's music?!

Yes my friends, the conniving sh*t-weasel, clown prince mandarin of the neoliberal project, Rahm Emanuel himself is reported up for some sort of position in Biden's Cabinet; presumably as a reward for eating enough kittens to secure Palooka's Joes backroom support within the Party - although at this point it's fair to say, the quest to reanimate his zombie career is not going entirely swimmingly. 

And as you can see from the screenshot above, this time it isn't just progressives up in arms; Rolling Stone senior writer Jamil Smith was among the many mainstream liberals outraged by the mere idea that Rahm might be returning to national office. And quite frankly, Smith is right; Emanuel is a scumbag lying monster who helped cover up the execution-style murder of a 17 year old African American teen named Laquan McDonald by the notoriously racist and abusive CPD aka, the Chicago Police Department. While that certainly isn't the only part of Rahms resume that should automatically disqualify him from office, it's arguably the most repugnant note in a long career full of such; and yes, as Jamil notes, including Emanuel in the cabinet would be profoundly insulting for African American voters who overwhelmingly turned out for Palooka Joe in the 2020 presidential election.  

So, what's the problem? Well, as I get older, my memory isn't always what it used to be, but for some reason I recall Jamal singing a different tune the last time a portion of the base got shafted by the elite liberal establishment - sometime back in March, or so; right after the centrist power brokers and an immensely popular former President knifed Bernie Sanders, his 2020 primary campaign, and the democratic socialist movement? 

Whoops - I betcha didn't count on becoming a walking "sowing/reaping" meme when you typed that one up huh? Smooth move ya f*cking brain genius; would you like a side order of boot to lick with that schadenfreude Jamil? But hey don't blame yourself my good man. I mean who could possibly have predicted that spuriously accusing the only truly anti-racist candidate in the 2020 Democratic Primary of taking Black voters for granted, as opposed to the guy who romanticized segregationists, helped write the racist 1994 Crime Bill and still believes cracker bullsh*t about the deficiencies of African American parenting, would at some point backfire? What kind of staggering powers of deduction would it have taken to realize that a former anti-bussing advocate who is known for peddling stories about a razor-wielding gangsta named Corn Pop and repeatedly lying about his own participation in the Civil Rights movement, might cynically discard Black voters immediately after getting elected? However could anyone in political media at all have conceivably foreseen this kind of f*ckery in advance? I mean you'd probably have to be like a senior writer who throughout his career has "explored the intersection of politics and identity" or something to figure all that sh*t out - oh, wait.

Now look, I'm not about to go off on some kind of reactionary skred about the evils of "identity politics" here, but this tweet is a prime example of high-profile Democrats and their media minions weaponizing issues of race, identity and marginalization to punch left, delegitimize anti-establishment political leaders and attack voters whose only crime is believing life would be better if there were no billionaires and we all shared our resources a little more. Furthermore, this type of divisive f*ckery is nothing new for Smith, who has clearly spent the past several years actively weaponizing issues of identity against the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party. and in particular, Bernie Sanders. Please keep in mind that we're talking about a guy who went from demanding Joe Biden drop out after the third debate because he's a hopelessly out of touch cracker, (while Smith himself was rather clearly in the tank for Kamala Harris, might I add) to essentially describing Palooka Joe's low-key racist declaration that "if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black” as a teachable moment; for a then 77 year old career politician, who also happens to be a U.S. Senator, and former Vice President. I don't want to call Jamil a double-talking, puppet assclown here, but let's just say the last time I saw principles that flexible, the situation involved a shady subprime mortgage.   

Or f*ck it, maybe that's just too kind and I really do want to call Smith a goddamn minion. After all, this asinine little sh*t-puppet knew full damn well when he typed that tweet that Sanders wasn't calling African American voters in South Carolina the "corporate establishment." As he made very clear at the time, Bernie was obviously talking about a months, if not years, long corporate media "fear and smear" campaign, publicly exposed clandestine "Stop Bernie" meetings among Democratic Party luminaries and yes, the Barack Obama-lead centrist "Voltron" strategy that saw almost (thanks Liz!) every other mainstream candidate drop out and endorse Biden with Sanders on the cusp of otherwise winning the nomination contest. This is simply not an honest mistake on Jamil's part because you'd have to have been living under a rock to accidentally take Sanders out of context in this extremely precise and dishonest way - clearly as a professional journalist covering the Democratic Party nomination contest for Rolling Stone, the author knew full well what Bernie was talking about; it is after all, his job. In other words, Smith's criticism was disingenuous media muppetry at its finest; which might go a long way towards explaining why Jamil is now a senior writer at Rolling Stone instead of roundtable chair-meat at MTV News; after all, we already have documented evidence that he's a real team player. 

So, will a vampire scumbag like Rahm Emanuel end up in Biden's government in the final reckoning? I have no idea! But one thing I can tell you is that Jamil's (rightfully) angry tweets won't factor into the decision at all; because even a decaying rapist mummy like Biden knows that the grumblings of an in-pocket, lacky propagandist, just don't amount to a whole Jamil of beans.

Welcome to Great Moments in Media Muppetry, agent Smith - you've certainly earned the honor.

• nina illingworth

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Article Analysis: Public Healthcare & Collective Bargaining (Re-Post)

 

Editor's note: continuing the ongoing content migration to escape Facebook's absurd anarchist and antifascist bans, I'm re-posting this bit of "short burst micro-analysis" here so it'll be somewhere on the internet even if the Zuckerbear eats me. Sometimes you don't need a lot of words to explain why a myopic and disingenuous argument is bullsh*t and that was certainly the case with this September 18th, 2019 post about a UAW strike and employer-provided healthcare.

How the GM workers strike makes Bernie Sanders’s case for Medicare-for-all

This is a surprisingly candid article about Medicare for All and Union-bargained health benefits that was posted under the teaser "Did General Motors just make the case for Medicare-for-all?"

The simple one word answer to this question is "yes" but I'd also like to point out that in Vox's desperate effort to remain "balanced" they perpetuated the pro-business argument that there is no evidence that reduced health care costs lead to higher wages - while simultaneously noting that "Companies use health care as leverage to negotiate down wage increases and other benefits. That’s why some of the biggest unions in the country support Medicare-for-all — or at least moving in that direction."

As anyone who has ever been to Canada, or the UK, or most of Europe, or any other country civilized enough to have both public healthcare and the right to organize will tell you however, this phenomenon exists only in America - everywhere else on the planet, unions are able to negotiate for either higher wages, or more benefits (think dental, eyeglasses, etc) in lieu of company sponsored health insurance.

Naturally, longtime observers of the American health insurance debate will recognize this willingly obtuse myopia - many of the arguments that have been used to deny Americans reasonable (and free) public healthcare options are firmly rooted in a type of American exceptionalism that refuses to acknowledge the dozens and dozens of countries that have tackled the problem of public healthcare without suddenly transforming into Stagflation Argentina.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Fear, Loathing and Mayonnaise in the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination Contest

Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a lengthy thread posted during November 21st, 2019 on my Mastodon account - there may be a few reference links I didn't feature here, that appear at the bottom of that thread if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Over the past few months, I've extensively covered the US corporate "liberal" media's clear attempts to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party nomination process in excruciating detail.

From NY Times smears designed to make the Sanders campaign look like a sexual harassment factory, to endless hours of coverage defending Palooka Joe Biden's racist babbling and on through the nonexistent coverage of a bigoted Liz Warren surrogate, a clear pattern of anti-Bernie bias has emerged. While this bias often expresses itself it many different and subtle forms, I think at this point it's safe to say that the pattern has been clearly demonstrated and the American corporate media is openly (and increasingly frantically) trying to influence the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest against Sanders - and in favor of candidates who are perceived by the liberal establishment as capable of beating Sanders. 

Clearly the machine is no longer sure that Joe Biden is such a candidate either.

This brings us to the “liberal” corporate media coverage surrounding an unlikely rise in the “First in the Nation” state polls of neoliberal candidate-like substance Pete Buttigieg; who will hereafter referred to in this space as Dollar Store Macron, or Mayo Pete - as befits his soulless, plastic & relentlessly focus-tested politics. To note that Mayo Pete has become the mainstream liberal establishment's latest "Great White Hope" is both not a metaphor and indicative of their open desperation.

If at this point you are still blissfully unaware of who Dollar Store Macron is, or precisely why I would describe his politics as "plastic and soulless" I'd encourage you to take a moment to stop and read this excellent profile of Mayo Pete by Nathan J Robinson over at Current Affairs - a piece recommended by  Noam Chomsky himself:

All About Pete

To learn more about the super villain factory Mayo Pete used to work for, a corporation called McKinsey & Company; check out this article by an anonymous former employee of the company, also published at Current Affairs: 

McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners

Finally, if you're still on the fence about whether or not Dollar Store Macron is an objectively terrible candidate for both the nomination and the office of POTUS, please read this extremely detailed and well sourced Twitter thread by user @niktaylorde for more information:

Why You Shouldn't Vote For Pete Buttigieg - A Thread

In other words, Pete Buttigieg is not only a terrible candidate for the labor class, but also a reasonably horrible human being - not that you'll really hear much about any of this in the media of course; the fact that he's young, gay and currently skullf*cking a "catchy" Panic At the Disco track to generate false enthusiasm at his campaign events, is pretty much as far as the corporate media's analysis is going to go when it comes to Mayo Pete.

This is unfortunate for the American voter because the Dollar Store Macron campaign has a serious problem that not only makes his campaign nonviable in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest, but could imperil his general election chances even if he somehow managed to win - Mayo Pete is currently polling below "raisins in potato salad" with African American voters; depending on which poll you examine, we're talking about a number between zero and one percent, literally.

Why? Well if you believe the insinuations of obtuse Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Lis Smith, it's because African American voters are homophobic; a narrative that even Dollar Store Macron himself has since (wisely) rejected:

Sharpton: 'We don't have an epidemic of homophobia' in the black community

  

Of course, that didn't stop the Buttigieg campaign from quietly leaking a focus group study that explicitly said Pete's sexuality is why black voters don't like him, back in October:

Buttigieg focus groups found being gay ‘a barrier’ for some black South Carolina voters

For a more accurate (and less "objectively racist") picture however, let's turn to The Intercept's Ryan Grim to study an example of the staggeringly tone-deaf, low-key racist way Mayor Pete has approached winning over African American voters in the run up to the 2020 Democratic Party primary season: 

The Problem with Pete Buttigieg's "Douglass Plan" for Black America

Whoa boy, so let's get unpack this for a moment here:

Mayo Pete, a man who is already haunted by anger over a court battle brought on by the South Bend, Indiana mayor's firing of a black police chief for recording his racist co-workers, and accusations of racist policies in his "model college town" of South Bend, is reaching out to black voters with a policy program named after cherished African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass - and amazingly enough, that's only strike one here.

Efforts to promote the Douglass Plan revolved around a published list of 400 prominent South Carolinians who were behind the plan, but this too demonstrated a willful attempt to mislead and deceive by the Buttigieg campaign. The list was represented as consisting of prominent African Americans, and yet almost half of the names on it were from white voters. The list also featured a cover letter that by use of the phrase “there is one presidential candidate who has proven to have intentional policies designed to make a difference in the Black experience, and that’s Pete Buttigieg” strongly implied the signers had endorsed Dollar Store Macron for the Democratic Party nomination; that wasn't true either - in fact, some of the "signers" worked for the Sanders campaign and others didn't even mean to endorse the Douglass Plan itself, let alone Mayo Pete.

When asked about this discrepancy directly the Buttigieg campaign offered up the wholly unserious answer that the so-called signers were sent an email encouraging them to "opt out" of endorsing the plan; you probably don't need me to tell you that this is absolutely *not* how endorsements work in American politics but as a side note, I'd like to point out that only a soulless cockroach McKinsey consultant would try to use the Columbia House Records scam to swindle endorsements from black leaders.

The final cherry on top of it all, and indeed the only part of this whole sad saga that received any significant amount of attention in the mainstream media at all, was that the Buttigieg campaign included a photo of a black woman who hadn't endorsed anything or anyone, had no connection to the campaign and had no idea why she'd been used in Dollar Store Macron's promotional material - because she's from Kenya. 

Pete Buttigieg says he was unaware that stock photo on his website depicted a Kenyan woman

And therein lies the crux of my argument and the definitive proof that the corporate "liberal" media is openly campaigning for anyone but Bernie in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest.

Imagine just for a moment the absolute righteous fury that would have consumed "liberal" mainstream pundits and influencers if it was Bernie Sanders who'd lied about African American endorsements to prop up his credentials with black voters? Imagine if it had been Bernie who'd responded with "Ma'am, I’m not asking for your vote" when confronted by a distraught African American voter about a police shooting of a young black man in the city he served as mayor? What if Bernie had started his political career by forcing out a black police chief on behalf of clearly racist cops inside the South Bend power structure?

Keep in mind that we're talking about the same guy here, Dollar Store Macron is responsible for all of these actions.

Frankly, you really don't even have to imagine - contrast the utter silence on Mayo Pete's (at best) obtuse honky nonsense, with the mainstream media dogpile Sanders was subjected to when he advised a young African American man to focus on not getting shot first, when pulled over by the police; after a question I won't describe as "unfair" but tragically, I cannot say there was a possible "good answer" for.

All throughout the 2016 primary process we were told by "Very Serious People TM" in the liberal media that African Americans, in particular black women, were the most important demographic in the electorate, and that a Democrat victory would not be possible in either 2016 or 2020 without the support of non-white voters. Specifically this narrative was used to hammer Bernie's campaign as supposedly "too white, and out of touch" or perhaps even outright racist - the last of which is absurd.

Now, today we find that the polling numbers show Sanders has*the* most diverse group of supporters, while pumped-up chosen "Bernie Slayers" like Elizabeth Warren and now Dollar Store Macron are driven by the same "too white, out of touch" voting demographic that supposedly rendered Bernie unelectable - and the response from the mainstream "liberal" media has been literally some combination of excuse-making apologia to go with complete and utter silence.

Of course none of that is to say that Dollar Store Macron hasn't been in the news; corporate "liberal" media in a America are falling all over themselves to type up a 255 respondent poll with dodgy methodology and an admitted 6.1% margin of error that shows Mayo Pete up an astounding +15% and leading New Hampshire - this of course pairs nicely with an equally dodgy recent poll from Iowa that once again showed Buttigieg leading, this time up by a mere (and implausible) +14%. Even that coverage demonstrates a considerable amount of bias; after all the media is hardly mentioning that Pete is dropping a massive amount of money to try to win one of these two (mostly white) "First in the Nation" primaries, or that if he doesn't win at least one of them the puffed up narrative (again aided by this same "liberal" media) surrounding his presidential aspirations is going to look like a pathetic punchline - instead, the corporate media would rather continue to attack Bernie Sanders.

Like all truly good lies however, there was a tiny bit of truth in the mainstream media's smearing of the Sanders campaign - it is in fact awfully hard to win a national election as a Democrat with only white voters, and doubly hard to win a Democratic Party nomination contest by that same measure; the trick is that this isn't a problem for Bernie (who appeals to young people and women especially across all demographics) it's a problem for candidates like Mayo Pete and Pow Wow Chow Liz Warren.

Furthermore, if one presupposes that most of the people reading this are in fact not racists and would prefer to live in a word where the fight against racism is undertaken seriously, the fact that the liberal media cynically used cries of racism to burn down the Sanders campaign, but has hardly chirped a note about the kind of cracker nonsense Mayo Pete's campaign is engaging in, represents a troubling continuation of longstanding enabling of structural racism by affluent liberals and Democrats.

The truth here is that no matter how hard the so-called "liberal" mainstream media in America tries to shove Mayo Pete into the spotlight and generate a plausible theory by which he can become president, Dollar Store Macron isn't going to win the 2020 Dem Party nomination contest - and it's not because he's gay, or because black people aren't thankful enough for his casual displays of obtuse racism; it's because he f*cking sucks as acandidate and bougie "liberal" pundits are getting desperate.

- Nina Illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!