American Political Dissidents Must Brace for Wave of Vicious Repression After Shooting of 12 Cops in Dallas, Texas

The sniper attack on police in Dallas at a Black Lives Matter Rally yesterday is going to result in revenge attacks against progressive activists, especially BLM activists, as surely as night follows day. There will also be more random police violence as police adopt a "defensive" mode of preemptive violence.

In the preceding two days before the sniper incident in Dallas, two black men were murdered in two U.S. cities. First in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old man whose "crime" was selling CDs on the street to support his five children, was tackled by police, pinned to the ground, and then shot five or six times in the chest. The police cannot lie their way out of this only because a bystander recorded a cellphone video. Of course, they will still get away with it. Sterling allegedly had a pistol in his pocket- perfectly legal in Louisiana, a state that boasts of having the laxest gun laws in the U.S., no permit needed to carry a gun.

The next day, another black man, Philando Castile, was shot dead in his car over a broken taillight. This occurred in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, named Falcon Heights. (Perhaps the police there see themselves as birds of prey, swooping down on hapless "blacks.") Castile informed the cop that he had a licensed gun, and when the cop asked for his driver's license, Castile reached for it and the cop filled him full of lead. Again, if a passenger in the car, Castile's girlfriend, hadn't been recording on her cellphone, the usual cover-up would have succeeded. As it is, the police seized her cellphone on the spot and treated her as an armed and dangerous criminal, but her phone was live streaming the video to her Facebook account. The police immediately deleted her account (which they have no right to do, but in the U.S., the police do whatever they want to certain categories of people, categories that increasingly include most of the population). However, others had already copied the video feed.  [1]

The snipers in Dallas shot 12 cops, killing 5, and two civilians. Two suspects were arrested because they were seen driving rapidly from the scene. The police have refused to identify them, or say whether rifles were recovered in their car. Doubtless they are being brutally tortured right now. A third suspect was cornered, allegedly made incriminating remarks, and while police "negotiated" with him, sent a bomb-carrying robot in his space and blew him up. Apparently their thirst for vengeance was so powerful that they couldn't wait him out and thus have the opportunity to interrogate him.

Initially disinformation was put out that this alleged sniper shot himself to death after being cornered. The first hint that this wasn't so came from Wade Goodwyn, one of the few honest NPR reporters. (NPR being the U.S. government's national radio network, which is partly sponsored by corporations and listener donations.) This morning Goodwyn didn't toe the "suicide" line but said the man died.

The establishment media has been quite mendacious about the murders of Sterling and Castile, including the British government propaganda network, the BBC. I will have some analysis of that forthcoming.

Meanwhile, the police, who are already permitted to continue killing people with impunity, and much more, will now ramp up their brutality and killings, and the general repression of dissent, especially dissent against police violence, will rise to a more intense level.

1] After her escape from the clutches of the police, Castile's girlfriend and witness to his murder, Diamond Reynolds, spoke emotionally to a crowd of sympathizers.

John McCain, Political Weathervane, Blows With the Wind

John McCain unwittingly planted some seeds of irony last year that have now sprouted. At the time, summer 2015, McCain openly bemoaned the xenophobic demagoguery of Donald Trump. Trump came to Arizona, McCain's state, to do some rabble-rousing among white racists, towing behind him as a stage prop the father of a person murdered by an undocumented (aka “illegal”) immigrant. [1]

The political mobilization of white racist xenophobes in Arizona presented a threat to McCain, because of his vulnerability to an extremist far-rightwing challenger in the Republican primary for his U.S. Senate seat. (U.S. Senate terms last 6 years, and McCain is running for reelection for a 6th term this November.)

McCain fretted of Trump's agitprop rally that “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me. Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.” “We have a very extreme element within our Republican Party,” in Arizona. “Now he galvanized them. He’s really got them activated.”

These are the comments that irked the schoolyard bully Trump, prompting him to denigrate McCain for only being called a hero for being “captured,” making McCain a “loser” in Trump's eyes. (As Trump avoided the draft, and certainly didn't volunteer, he was never in any danger of capture and possible Loserhood himself. It was mostly the poor and other lower economic classes who were subjected to impressment into the U.S. military to attack Indochina. McCain was descended from a military family and entered the U.S. Naval Academy to pursue a career as a navy officer, later finding politics more to his taste.)

Now here are some excerpts from an article in a haute bourgeois U.S. publication that ran in July of last year. I have highlighted certain phrases:

McCain is an ardent backer of his good friend Senator Lindsey Graham, who is languishing in the G.O.P. Presidential primary polls. He noted that Graham has been one of the few Republicans to condemn Trump in strong terms. On Sunday, Graham said on CNN, “I think [Trump]’s a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community, and we need to push back.” He added that Republicans “need to reject this demagoguery. If we don’t, we will lose, and we will deserve to lose.”

McCain, who is eighteen years older than Graham, sounded like a proud father. “Lindsey said this is a moral test for our party. He put on a very strong performance,” McCain said. “Of course, Lindsey was one of the eight of us who negotiated immigration reform. Lindsey never backed away from it.”
McCain, who had a testy relationship with Senator Marco Rubio, another member of the Gang of Eight who is running for President, couldn’t resist adding, “Rubio backed away from it.”

I noted that Rubio, like many other Republican politicians, has been hard to follow on the issue and no longer supports the compromise approach that the Gang of Eight took in 2013: combining a pathway to citizenship and tough new border measures in a single bill. McCain licked his finger, held it up in the air, and laughed.

“You know that old song from before you were born?” McCain said, speaking of the Bob Dylan classic “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” [2]

Indeed.

So McCain, who hops on the Trump bandwagon, laughed at Rubio as someone who, like a weathervane, points in whatever direction the political winds are blowing. Note that McCain's political compadre Graham, and the Bushes, and Mitt Romney, and many other prominent Republicans, have publicly disavowed Trump. And McCain said Amen to Graham's call to resist the demagoguery of Trump. Not just as a political necessity, but as a “moral test.”

Read my previous essay, just below, about McCain, and see if you can spot more ironies. [“John McCain Has No Pride.”] 

As they say in those English-speaking isles across the Atlantic, Cheers!

1] Trump and his ilk have been raising a terrible stink about two murders committed by non-citizens present in the U.S. without permission. Given that there are an estimated 11 million such people here (out of an estimated population of 315 million), no one should be shocked if some of them commit murder. There were 16,121 homicides in the U.S. in 2013, according to the CDC. (Over two-thirds of the homicides were committed with firearms, by the way.) Doubtless the vast majority were the crimes of U.S. citizens. But of course racism and xenophobia are impervious to rational thought, so this is a case of, in the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, “facts are stupid things.”

Or in the satirical stylings of comedian Steve Colbert, “truthiness” trumps mere truth. Because emotions are stronger than reason, feelings are more vivid, thus “truer,” than facts, which are intellectual abstractions. You could say that much of the problems of humanity are rooted in this basic structural and existential fact of the mind/psyche. We have (some of us, anyway) rational capability, but it is very hard to be rational, to live guided by reason.

2] “John McCain Has a Few Things to Say About Donald Trump,” New Yorker, July 16, 2015.

The new logo for the Republican Party. (Replaces the elephant, an intelligent, brave, loyal creature unjustly besmirched by involuntary association with the Gang Of Plunderers.)