Perhaps David Swanson has the best one-sentence summary of what I mean by Deep State bullshit: "We live in an age in which the most important facts are not seriously disputed and also not seriously known or responded to."
Less Comfy with Bullshit, Dems Sound More Full of It
While, for both parties, Deep State policies and policy talk result in sheer bullshit--insane, reality-ignoring policies that amount to "nonsense on stilts"--Democrats suffer the added harm of looking and sounding as if they're full of bullshit. Republicans, nearer in actual philosophy to the (repulsive) Deep State agenda, don't appear nearly as insincere or spineless. Needless to say, for Democrat pols attempting to inspire or appear "on the side of the angels," bearing the Deep State burden of self-censorship and insincerity amounts to messaging castration. This is necessarily so, since the only possible sincerity would mean blurting out the tabooed truth about the Deep State itself.
Some examples should clarify my meaning. Consider, for instance, the mother of all Deep State puppet shows--the 2012 Obama-Romney debates--where the bipartisan Deep State was in evidence as much by what was said as what was not. Following the military-industrial Deep State script, Obama and Romney vied in saber-rattling over which candidate would more forcefully quash Iran's "existential threat" to Americans. This was particularly pungent bullshit, since the government's own intelligences agencies had just issued reports rating Iran scarcely a threat at all. But the stench of this vociferous bullshit was perhaps minor compared to the mephitic silence over the real existential threat to all of human civilization: climate change. Debaters Obama and Romney, dancing on gas and oil puppet strings, never dared mention it once.
Or consider the whole militaristic, universal-surveillance framework of the "global war on terror." Now, the very concept is bullshit--nonsense on elevated stilts--correctly ridiculed by some terrorism experts as "war against a tactic" or, perhaps more incisively, by Monty Python comedian Terry Jones as "war on an abstract noun." And, not just conceptually but empirically, the war on terror has proven to be bullshit: hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead, the U.S. trillions of dollars deeper in debt, U.S. moral credibility shot, global civil liberties lost, and Middle East terrorism more rampant than ever. Yet, just once let the terror tactic rear its head--as in a theatrical beheading--and our knee-jerk reaction is bombs, drones, arms and training for potential terrorists, and (sooner or later) "boots on the ground." But, since the war on terror is deeply profitable for the military-industrial-surveillance complex, when terror-warfare talks, bullshit always walks.
Or again, consider the sheer fascist injustice of Chelsea Manning's draconian prison sentence under the outmoded WWI Espionage Act--a law intended to punish foreign spies, not classic whistleblowers. Manning was not only tried under this law, but forbidden to mount the whistleblowers' essential public-interest defense. To appreciate the sheer "stinks to heaven" nature of this outrage, contrast Manning's supersized sentence with the breezy freedom enjoyed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Both these men are authentic Nuremberg war criminals, guilty not just of torture but of the Nuremberg code's worst crime, aggressive war. Yet they remain free to build libraries for their own glorification and haunt the media pundit circuit. Here, bullshit literally walks, yet where has a single Democrat (forget Republicans) dared to denounce this sulfurous injustice?
Clearly, Democrats' servile, if half-willing, Deep State bootlicking saps most of the juice from their moral message. Democrats will tell you, with evident sincerity, that electing them will add jobs and protect education and the social safety net. What they can't tell you with any sincerity is that electing them won't mean endless war, more drone killings of foreign innocents, expanded global surveillance and police militarization, secret trade deals steamrolling democracy and the environment, presidential deep-sixing of the Constitution and international law, brutal state repression of needed protest movements like Occupy, and--worst of all--ramped-up production and export of climate-destroying fossil fuels. Tellingly, Democrats' boot-lackey service to the Deep State means extensive loss of campaign work (and votes) from progressives--potentially their best, most politically active supporters. Can Dems seriously expect progressives to "get pumped" for poll work with our jaws hanging aghast at their "shadow agenda"? With Democrats like Obama or Clinton at the helm, how do we know which Democratic Party--the socially conscious, progressive one, or the fascistic Deep State cat's paw--we're voting for? Isn't voting for Democrats increasingly rewarding bad--and even illegal and unconstitutional-- behavior?
Life Beyond Bullshit
Democrats would clearly turbocharge their party's moral clarity--and ignite wildfires of progressive enthusiasm--by pink-slipping Deep State strumpet Hillary Clinton and handing the party keys to independent, progressive outsider Bernie Sanders. Needless to say, the Deep State forces now setting over half the party agenda will fight tooth-and-claw--with their gargantuan resources--to keep that from happening. So progressives' and climate activists' only hope of rebranding Democrats as Bernie's party is electoral blackmail. More on this in my next series article, "Life Beyond Bullshit: Of Bernie and Blackmail."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
