Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Well, well, well. It looks like Harvey Weinstein's Vinnie The Chin act failed to work on the jury at his trial. For those of you who've forgotten, Vinnie The Chin Gigante was an American mobster who used to wander the streets of New York mumbling to himself in his pajamas and/or bathrobe. It was all part of an act. Vinnie figured he'd be going to trial sooner or later so he thought he'd build up a fake insanity defense, something Rudy Giuliani also appears to be doing.

Anyway, Harvey The Rapist Weinstein thought he'd make a play for sympathy by appearing in court with a walker during his trial. Harvey The Rapist wasn't very adept at the fakery. It didn't work any better than Paul Manafort's wheelchair or Bill Cosby's cane. Some days, Harvey The Rapist Weinstein seemed to be practically dragging his damn walker along, not leaning on it for support. The most telling footage happened when he was found guilty on 2 of the 3 counts against him. He no longer seemed to care about the walker as he was dejectedly led from the courtroom without relying on it at all. You could almost see him wondering, "What'll I do with this thing now?"

Dear Harvey, I hope you do go to jail for a very, very long time. I hear you could get as much as 25 years and there's still at least one more trial on your busy executive schedule. I hope that Donald Trump, the Harvey Weinstein of presidents, doesn't pardon you in order to condition the public in the remote case he is ever tried for the same crimes. I also hope that you find several new friends in prison named Bubba who teach you a hard, hard, very hard lesson about how it feels to be raped. May they line up to greet you.

How Widely Will the Sex Abuse Scandals Spread Before They're "Contained"?

by Gaius Publius

Just a heads up. The liberal-side sexual abuse scandal that's spreading widely, catching both greater and lesser lights, is not likely to let up. Large fish (for example, Harvey Weinstein) and smaller (for example, the Washington Spectator's Hamilton Fish V) are getting entangled in the net of long-delayed, entirely appropriate outrage. The circle of scrutiny is wide, enough so that even apparently innocent people, like Matt Taibbi for instance, feel compelled to post preventive pieces like this.

Spreading Like a Fire

We're in the spreading phase of this wild fire. Soon the firefighters will come to tamp it down. Will they succeed? My guess is yes. After all, the practice is apparently so rampant that the sheer number of people taken out — on our side, good progressives, yes, but also guilty of what we most claim to disavow — may prove too large, with too many of the names too prominent.

Hollywood tried circling, to some degree, its wagons around Weinstein, and those who early on defended him are coming for their own share of shame. As many have noted, yours truly included, there are many ways the Weinstein world and culture touches the larger liberal world and culture.

My best guess is that the powers that be in the left-mainstream world will look for a time to shout "Enough already. We get the point. Let's not spill any more blood," surely a move to defend those many about to be touched. Watch for that.

As an example of what still hidden from most eyes, and what will most definitely, with backstage force, remain buried from wide public view for as long as possible, consider the following.

A World Hiding Serial Harassers Hides Serial Pedophiles As Well

A world like Hollywood or mainstream politics — on both sides of the aisle — hides not only many individuals who "get away with it" because, well, they can. It hides self-sustaining and reinforcing groups of those who "get away with it" as well.

Consider Fox News, for example, as not just a place where lots of sexual abusers work(ed), but as an organization that proactively attracts and enables those people. This is not passive allowance of a crime, but proactive creation of it. If the organizational heads at Fox News were engaged in procuring people to be put into lives of prostitution, for example, we'd call the organization by a gangland term, a "prostitution ring."

Which leads us to the other main point of this piece. It looks like there is or has been a pedophile ring operating in many of the Hollywood circles inhabited by good "liberal" people like Harvey Weinstein.

This comes from former child actor Corey Feldman via Zero Hedge:

For years, actor and former child star Corey Feldman has been warning anybody who would listen that Hollywood is a place where adults have more inappropriate contact with children than probably anywhere else in the world.

So it’s unsurprising given the renewed focus on sexual assault and harassment brought about by the Harvey Weinstein scandal that Feldman’s accusations would receive renewed attention, considering he made the media rounds as recently as 2016 to talk about how a pedophile ring in Hollywood abused him and his friend, fellow actor Corey Haim – actions Feldman blames for Haim’s eventual death from a drug overdose.

And yesterday, he returned to the “Today” show and, during an interview with Matt Lauer vowed to release the names of six men who he alleges participated in the abuse of himself, Haim and other young stars. The interview followed Feldman’s announcement in a YouTube video last week that he was launching an Indiegogo page to try and raise money for a feature film about pedophilia in Hollywood that he hopes to direct. However, as Lauer pointed out, Feldman’s target budget - $10 million – appears lofty. But the former child star appears determined to tell his story the way he wants it to be told.

See the video above for Feldman's interview with, to my ears, a defensive Matt Lauer asking the questions. A brief segment:

LAUER: “Why are you talking to me? Why aren’t you talking to the police right now?”

FELDMAN: “I told the police. In fact if anyone wants to go back to 1993, when I was interviewed by the Santa Barbara Police Department. I sat there and gave them the names. They are on record. They have all of this information, but they were scanning Michael Jackson. All they cared about was trying about to find something on Michael Jackson.”

LAUER: “Who you said, by the way, did not abuse you.”

FELDMAN: “Who Michael was innocent. And that was what the interview was about with the pollice in 1993. I told them, he is not that guy. And they said, maybe you don’t understand your friend. And I said, no, I know the difference between pedophiles and somebody that is not a pedophile because I have been molested. Here’s the names, go investigate. And let me push this forward, there are thousands of people in Hollywood that have the same information. Why is it all on me? Why is it, if I don’t release the names in the next two months, six months or a year, I’m the bad guy. I’m the victim here. I’m the one who has been abused. I’m the one who is trying to come forward and do something about it.”

LAUER: “But —“ [crosstalk]

FELDMAN: “Please, I’m sorry. There are thousands of people out there, Matt, who have this information. Any one of those child actors that went to the teenage soda pop clubs with me when I was a kid, know who those people are and the people who ran it. Anybody can go back through history and look at the Teen magazines and say what was the name of that venue they were promoting and who ran that venue own who endorsed it.”

If you noted the references to "soda pop clubs" in Feldman's comments, one name that keeps coming up is "Alphy's Soda Pop Club." We're in Rumorville here, so I'll just link to one piece discussing it. Names associated with Alphy's club, of which Feldman and Corey Haim appear to be founding members, include then-teens like "Alyssa Milano, Nicole Eggert, Ricky Schroeder, Drew Barrymore, Alfonso Ribero, Scott Grimes" and more. Many, few, or none of those people may have been victims, but still, that's a lot of name people.

Notice too that Feldman mentions "soda pop clubs," plural. Are there more?

In addition, Feldman has blamed a "Hollywood mogul" for his friend and fellow child actor Corey Haim's death, not as a direct cause, but an indirect one (Haim died after years of substance abuse):

In 2011, Feldman claimed that a "Hollywood mogul" who abused Haim was to blame for his death.[93] The 2013 memoir by Corey Feldman, Coreyography, details the sexual abuse he and Haim suffered as young actors in the film industry; during the filming of Lucas, Feldman stated that Haim "allowed himself to be sodomized",[94] and "had been tricked into engaging in a painful session of anal sex by a man on the movie set. The man told Haim that sex between men and boys was normal in Hollywood, saying that 'all the guys in the entertainment world do it.'

Note also the inability to people to criticize Kevin Spacey, as his name rises again into this discussion. Not part of any "ring" per se; there are no such allegations. But he has a past that includes admitting he "may have" handled a 14-year-old inappropriately. Will his current status as a darling of the left play mitigate the renewed criticism he may encounter?

Bottom Line

Again, just a heads up. Your takeaways for now:

• This scandal could grow very very big, implicating many.

• If a coverup comes, it will come in force. Watch for it.

• If a coverup comes, everyone involved in making it seem lighter that it should be, or making it go away, is complicit.

Just saying. This will absolutely be a test of mainstream liberal, and possibly progressive, adherence to a principle which that culture claims to honor deeply.

GP
 

The Resistance, the #Resistance and Harvey Weinstein

Offered ironically. The roughest waters lie ahead of us.

by Gaius Publius

"For certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power."

     –Thomas Frank

The real resistance occurred in 2016. It failed in both parties.

     –Yours truly

There's something greatly troubling about what the media-fronted #Resistance has morphed into, but I'm having trouble writing about it (it's lightly touched here: "A Nation in Crisis, Again"). Partly the problem is the marshaling of pages of proof; partly the problem is the unstoppable train wreck that's coming. Perhaps I should write about the train wreck instead.

After all, as noted in the link above, "No Praetorian Guard, once it grows muscular, reverts back to a simple barracks unit just because new leadership arrives." And the anti-Trump leadership in both parties is growing us a Praetorian Guard, if we don't have one already. You may be cheering it onward as we speak, depending on the latest lashings from former and current security state personnel, but what you're cheering, if you do, enables an unelected, uncontrolled and muscular security state, one you've certainly been appalled by in many other contexts.

Trump will go; but the unelected state grows only stronger, now with help from the #Resistance. Do you see the dilemma? How to write about this to a nation in love with what it will come, but only later, to hate?

How Principled Is the #Resistance?

Another troubling aspects of the "professional resistance" — for example, the MSNBC version, which constantly offers the worst of the New Dems and neoliberals for cheers by the anti-Trump crowd — is that I suspect it's not at all principled.

For example, the charge "Russia's attack on our election is an act of war" has been made and platformed daily for almost a year — spoken by those for whom it would be heresy to say that U.S. interferences in elections around the world are also "acts of war."

As one of far too many examples, consider Honduras:

At the beginning of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State in 2009, the Honduran military ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in a coup d’etat. The United Nations condemned the military coup and the Organization of American States suspended Honduras from its membership, calling for Zelaya’s reinstatement. Instead of joining the international effort to isolate the new regime, Clinton’s State Department pushed for a new election and decided not to declare that a military coup had occurred.

“If the United States government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid, including humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people,” Clinton said when asked about Honduras in April. “So, our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and we immediately have to stop all aid for the people, but we should slow walk and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of, without calling it a coup.”

Clinton said that she didn’t want Zelaya returning to power. “Zelaya had friends and allies, not just in Honduras, but in some of the neighboring countries, like Nicaragua and that we could have had a terrible civil war that would have been just terrifying in its loss of life.”

Emails that have since surfaced show that Clinton and her team worked behind the scenes to fend off efforts by neighboring democracies through the Organization of American States to restore the elected president to power.

Is this also a declaration of war by the U.S. against Honduras? Did the U.S. declare war on Iran in 1953 when the CIA unseated the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh?

The answer to all these question may well be Yes. But would the pro-Clinton hosts and guests at MSNBC, of which there are many, say so? Especially if Clinton herself were to be tarred with that same brush? Using Trump-Russia logic, would Rachel Maddow charge Clinton with abetting an "act of war" against Honduras? Hardly likely.

As I said, I suspect the "professional resistance" to Donald Trump is not at all principled, but opportunistic and entirely one-sided, however right or wrong that one side might be.

The Failed Electoral Revolution of 2016

All this has led me to wonder what the goal of this professional #Resistance really is. The Restoration of Democracy to America? Or the Restoration of Mainstream Democrats — the anti-Sanders, anti-progressive, "you can't have that" crowd — to power again?

If just the latter, the nation may sink more slowly beneath the neoliberal waves than it would under solid Republican rule, a plus to many people's way of thinking, but progressives will still have an enemy who hates all they stand for, armed, enabled and in the field against them. Does strengthening the professional, media-curated #Resistance, without at the same time fighting to dethrone the Clintonists and Obamists actively moved into its front ranks, serve either the cause of progressivism or, given the increasing power of the unelected state, the interest of American democracy? One has to wonder.

The real Resistance, of course, occurred in 2016, in that year's electoral revolt against the money-bought in both parties, and it failed in both parties. Mainstream Democrats successfully fended off the actual populist in their race, Bernie Sanders, whom they hate even to this day. Mainstream Republicans successfully elected their "populist," the fake swamp-drainer Donald Trump, and his voters are getting nothing they wanted in terms of relief from the relentless greed and austerity they rebelled against.

The nation, meanwhile, is left with a still-unsatisfied populist anger, waiting like an abscess to erupt. What form that will take in 2018 and 2020 is anyone's guess. Failed revolutions, like bad meals, often come back stronger.

The #Resistance, Mainstream Democrats and Harvey Weinstein

Who are these mainstream Democrats? According to Thomas Frank, they're Harvey Weinstein:

Let us now consider the peculiar politics of Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie producer. Today Weinstein is in the headlines for an astonishing array of alleged sexual harassment and assaults, but once upon a time he was renowned for something quite different: his generous patronage of liberal politicians and progressive causes.

This leading impresario of awful was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He was a strong critic of racism, sexism and censorship. He hosted sumptuous parties to raise money for the fight against Aids.

In 2004 he was a prominent supporter of a women’s group called “Mothers Opposing Bush”. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, he stood up boldly for freedom of the press. Taking to the pages of Variety, Weinstein announced that “No one can ever defeat the ability of great artists to show us our world.”

But lest you think Frank is tarring the Clintonist-Obamist wing of the Party with Weinstein in a guilt-by-association manner, he digs deeper (emphasis mine):

Most people on the left think of themselves as resisters of authority, but for certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power. Specifically, the power of what some like to call the “creative class”, by which they mean well-heeled executives in industries like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Worshiping these very special people is the doctrine that has allowed Democrats to pull even with Republicans in fundraising and that has buoyed the party’s fortunes in every wealthy suburb in America.

That this strain of liberalism also attracts hypocrites like Harvey Weinstein, with his superlative fundraising powers and his reverence for “great artists”, should probably not surprise us. Remember, too, that Weinstein is the man who once wrote an essay demanding leniency for Roman Polanski, partially on the grounds that he too was a “great artist”.

Harvey Weinstein seemed to fit right in.

And then the meat of Frank's argument:

This is a form of liberalism that routinely blends self-righteousness with upper-class entitlement. That makes its great pronouncements from Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. That routinely understands the relationship between the common people and showbiz celebrities to be one of trust and intimacy.

Countless people who should have known better are proclaiming their surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuses. But in truth, their blindness is even more sweeping than that. They are lost these days in a hall of moral mirrors, weeping tears of admiration for their own virtue and good taste.

Is the anti-Trump #Resistance, the professional broadcast version with its behind-the-scenes security state actors, simply setting us up for a Restoration of those — a Pence, a Biden, or another darling of our dual mainstream parties — who "weep tears of admiration for their own virtue" as they tank or attempt to co-opt the next Bernie Sanders, or re-destroy the last one? Stay tuned. The answer is coming soon.

And if they do, will America weep tears of thanks, or something else?

GP