Today’s Caitlin Johnstone essay has been replaced by this breaking report by the National News Conglomerate. NNC: Obey.

Following shocking reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post that Moscow is simultaneously working to both re-elect Donald Trump and ensure the nomination of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary race, NNC has obtained further information confirming that nearly all candidates currently running for president are in fact covert agents of the Russian government.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the lone candidate not literally conducting espionage on behalf of the Russian government is Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“Intelligence has revealed that Mr. Buttigieg is at this time the only candidate who we can count on not to place our nation’s interests square in the hands of Vladimir Putin,” an anonymous source in the Central Intelligence Agency told NNC on Saturday.

“In fact Mr. Buttigieg is the only candidate running with the skill, the experience and the multilingual relatability needed to bridge our nation’s deep divisions and bring Americans together in this time of uncontrolled hostility,” the CIA source continued.

“Because in truth, the unity of our togetherness is in the freedom of our democracy,” added the source. “The long and winding road to the American flag was built upon the steps of our founding fathers. You don’t have to be a big shot Washington insider to see that the problems our nation faces are tearing us apart at our own peril with radical divisive rhetoric saying you need to burn down the establishment and voice a concrete foreign policy position. And that’s why I for one believe we don’t have to choose between revolution and the status quo: we can come together and find solutions that help the working class and billionaires.”

Experts say these new revelations on Russian election interference should consume one hundred percent of all news coverage for the entirety of 2020, and that Democrats should definitely spend all their time from now until November focusing solely on President Trump’s suspicious ties to the Russian government.

“I can’t think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong if Democrats focused exclusively on the possibility that the president conspired with Vladimir Putin in the lead-up to the election in November,” said Les Overton of the influential think tank Americans for an American America. “If Democrats want to prevent another four years of Trump they should hit him where they know it hurts: nonstop 24/7 Russia conspiracy theories. That’s what Americans really care about.”

Asked if it’s possible that undue emphasis on Russian collusion could prove a fruitless endeavor given Trump’s soaring approval rating after impeachment resulted in his acquittal and the Mueller report failed to indict a single American for conspiring with the Russian government, Overton disagreed and said this time will be “like, totally different.”

“Democrats should definitely invest all of their mental and emotional energy in this Trump-Russia scandal, because this time it’s a sure thing,” Overton said. “Put all your eggs in this basket and get your hopes up very, very high. The big BOOM is coming any minute now, I promise.”

Overton then departed with an envelope full of cash which he said was his life savings, reportedly to invest in lottery tickets.

medium.com

Hughes Mearns

This year, the Democratic Party caucus-goers of Midwest, prosperous Iowa and the voters of hard-scrabble, post-industrial, impoverished Granite State New Hampshire 1,342 miles (2,160 kilometers) away agreed on a historic decision:

They put the fantasy of a wonderful, First-Ever Lady President of the United States behind them and significantly tilted towards embracing a First-Ever, Openly Gay President instead.

This is the real meaning behind the rise of Pete Buttigieg to second place among caucus voters in Iowa (though narrowly leading there in the number of pledged delegates) and in New Hampshire, and of the dramatic decline of Senator Elizabeth Warren in both U.S. states.

Warren tried out different suits of political clothes and public policies through her endlessly promoted but always hollow and insubstantial campaign. None of them fitted convincingly on her.

Warren tried to be the candidate of the fake populist, fraudulent left championing Those In Need –a familiar trope.

She did not realize that Senator Bernie Sanders – significantly always a flinty Independent outside the Democratic Party mainstream – retained his rock-solid hold on his supporters from 2016.

By the time Warren – not at all the brightest of political light bulbs – realized her crucial mistake and tried to cut back to the Democrats’ so-called moderate center (the terms are actually meaningless, but universally swallowed by gullible Americans), it was too late.

In reality, there is a much stronger and far more plausible mainstream lady Democratic potential candidate.

Senator Amy Klobuchar comes from Minnesota and is far more a daughter of the vast American Heartland than Warren, who grew up in Ohio, but fled it to Massachusetts and the fake intellectual distinction of Harvard as quickly as she could.

Klobuchar is 20 years younger than Warren, far more controlled in public and not prone to Warren’s hysteria.

In terms of policy there is in reality little to differentiate them. But Klobuchar knows how to superficially talk to Heartland Americans without convincing them she regards them as dumb little poodle dogs –an absolutely vital requirement for any presidential contender in the 21^st century United States. Warren, like Hillary Clinton before her, could never master that vital skill.

However, as the contest outcomes in radically contrasting Iowa and New Hampshire show, instead of Klobuchar’s genuinely solid record after 12 years in the United States Senate, Democratic voters are tilting towards Pete Buttigieg: a man who only been mayor of tiny (100,000 population) South Bend, Indiana – and a far from distinguished mayor at that.

Far from being Mr. Clean, Buttigieg in fact has a mysterious background in U.S. Naval Intelligence and an astonishing degree of public support from scores of senior officials in the Secret State.

In fact Buttigieg has never been what he appears to be. He was accepted to Pembroke College at Oxford University in England on a Rhodes scholarship – an elite path previously followed by President Bill Clinton, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and warmongering neocon columnist the late Charles Krauthammer among others.

He went to Harvard. He has literally scores of endorsements from extraordinarily high level officials in the CIA and throughout the U.S. intelligence community on his web site.

He was a successful employed consultant at McKinsey for three years. His career trajectory closely parallels that of President Emmanuel Macron of France, the supposedly super-smart, highly sheltered and arrogant little policy wonk always ready to ax the jobs and lives of hundreds of thousands of ordinary families on the sacred altar of “efficiency.”

Buttigieg served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in intelligence. He had a seven month deployment in Afghanistan in 2014 for which he was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal. Yet he never rose beyond the level of lieutenant – the bottom rank of officers. And he has all these Deep State endorsements.

In fact, in so far as Pete Buttigieg is typical of anything, it is not the Democratic Party, the American Midwest, the state of Indiana or the modest mini-city of South Bend he has so manifestly failed to run impressively.

Instead, Buttigieg is the latest classic example of what in these columns a year ago (March 29, 2019) I described as the phenomenon of the “Boy Toys” apparently cloned by the CIA as supposedly harmless puppets to (pretend to) run the West.

As I wrote at the time, there is an astonishing element of similarity to all these figures. They are all in their forties or late 30s (Buttigieg is 38). They could all pass as teenagers. They all project an attempted air of wholesomeness and earnest idealism which their records reveal as utterly fraudulent. And none of them has any record of distinction in either domestic or international affairs.

“Little Pete” Buttigieg fits this profile eerily: Like the rest of them, he was plucked from nowhere on the basis of nothing more profound than his willingness to swallow the same old internationalist, liberal, free trade party line to cover endless aggressions, fostered coups, civil wars and other crimes against humanity.

Buttigieg, like his fellow Boy Toys is also a perfect candidate to be, in the wonderful words with which Alice Roosevelt Longworth dismissed 1948 U.S. presidential candidate Tom Dewey, the little toy man on top of a giant wedding cake.

The Mighty Mayor of South Bend is also a convincing candidate to be the Last Ever President of the United States: For he is the natural successor to Romulus Augustulanus, the ludicrous teenage last legal emperor of Rome (for less than a year) in 475-6 AD.

What a way to go.

Let’s just cut right to the chase with a couple questions that the media has glaringly failed to consider about the top-polling Democratic presidential candidate. First, the most obvious one. How on earth does a young Midwestern mayor, regardless of his polished resume, jump to the front of the serving line, past hundreds of veteran politicians who have quietly nurtured presidential ambitions inside of the Beltway their entire lives?

As The Economist emphatically stated this week, “Mr Buttigieg is ridiculously young to be doing so well.”

Second, if the mayor of South Bend, Indiana (pop. 101,166) is now in serious contention to challenge Donald Trump in November, what exactly does that say about the depth of the Democratic bench, loaded as it is with Senators, House members, Governors and various state officials with far more political experience and acumen?

Today, LGBTQ+ youth in America aren’t just grappling with a crisis of belonging in their communities, many are left without a home or a place to sleep. I am so proud of @PeteButtigieg‘s agenda for housing justice and what it means for vulnerable youth. https://t.co/btn2zKDrXd

— Chasten Buttigieg (@Chas10Buttigieg) February 17, 2020

While the Oval Office has seen its share of pretenders, and even actors, the great majority of those men who made it to the pinnacle of power have spent at least some time in high political office before contemplating a presidential run. Incidentally, it is on this particular point, political experience, which could make a Trump-Buttigieg debate a very interesting spectacle. Although Buttigieg has limited political experience, Trump had none before he entered the White House, although certainly proving his abilities once in office.

For Pete’s sake!

Born on January 19, 1982, Buttigieg graduated valedictorian from St. Joseph High School in 2000. That same year he won a JFK ‘Profiles in Courage’ essay contest on the subject of none other than Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist the incredibly rising mayor is competing against for the November nod. “Above all, I commend Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption,” Buttigieg wrote. His trip to Washington D.C. to collect his prize included a meeting with members of the Kennedy clan, an honor that must have left a deep impression on the 18 year old.

Upon graduation from Harvard University, Buttigieg did a stint (2007-2010) at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Co, the discreet U.S. management consulting firm. During his time there, the young upstart took a trip to perhaps the most unlikely destinations in the world, Somaliland, a self-proclaimed independent state in Africa that is struggling for international recognition to this day. In other words, not a trip to Disneyland.

Just before embarking on his African adventure (Summer of 2008), Buttigieg was taken on as a fellow with the Truman National Security Project, a neoliberal think tank that has been described as “a powerful and exclusive club for the best and brightest young progressives in the country.” Among its esteemed alumni is none other than Madeleine Albright, chief architect of NATO’s obliteration of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the founder of the Truman Project, Rachel Kleinfeld, deserves some consideration.

Upon graduating from Oxford, Kleinfeld took up employment with Booz Allen Hamilton, the private contractor that carried out a long list of services for the military. It has also been described as “the world’s most profitable spy organization.” The head of the company at the time was none other than James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has advocated for a fiercely interventionist U.S. foreign policy, notably the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Back to Somaliland. In addition to Buttigieg’s affiliation with the Truman Center, where he now sits on the advisory board, his Somalian ‘vacation’ managed to garner special attention in The New York Times, suggesting this was much more than your ordinary getaway.

“Somaliland is pursuing investment and support from China and Gulf countries,” Buttigieg wrote in the Times piece, co-authored by Nathaniel Myers, who also went along for the joyride. “Such support might be enough to ensure Somaliland’s survival and eventual growth, but it will crowd out America’s chance to win the gratitude of a potentially valuable ally in a very troubled area.”

Possibly more than just incidentally, Myers, a Harvard buddy of Buttigieg, now serves as Senior Transition Advisor at USAID – Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), which works to destabilize governments deemed unfavorable to U.S. interests.

Just over a year later, in September 2009, Buttigieg, and despite his participation in anti-war rallies while at Harvard, signed up for the U.S. Navy Reserve. Due to his particular “pedigree,” writes Stars and Stripe magazine, he was sworn in as an ensign in naval intelligence without any prior preparation, which is not the traditional route for enlistees. In 2014, he was deployed to Afghanistan, which required Buttigieg to take a seven-month leave of absence from his mayoral duties in South Bend. Here is where the political upstart’s career begins to look a little sketchy.

This most disturbing thing about Pete 100% pic.twitter.com/1EhgcCyZgT

— Heshmat Alavi’s Trenchcoat (@UrOrientalist) February 5, 2020

According to The Grayzone, Buttigieg “spent his six months in Afghanistan in 2014 with a little-known unit that operated under the watch of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), according to his appointment papers.”

What exactly did Special Officer Pete Buttigieg do in this unit, which was founded by none other than the future CIA chief General David Patreaus, who at the time was the head of U.S. Central Command? Well, that’s hard to say because the job description that appears in his discharge papers is left conveniently blank. This, and the fact that the ATFC has direct links to U.S. intelligence has fueled rumors with regards to who or what was responsible for placing the mayor of South Bend, Indiana on the political fast lane.

But those sorts of connections alone cannot explain Buttigieg’s meteoric rise in Washington, D.C., especially when the young upstart spent the majority of his time in South Bend. No, Pete Buttigieg would require boatloads of cash to earn such fame in such a short time. And as it turns out, the money has been pouring into his coffers from some of the wealthiest families in the country.

The spook’s choice: Coup plotters and CIA agents fill Mayor Pete’s list of national security endorsers@Cancel_Sam looks at Buttigieg’s new roster of endorsements from high-ranking spies, regime-change architects, and global financiershttps://t.co/RBQTnDKu7g

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) December 30, 2019

Buttigieg attracts the bucks

According to federal election data, forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, putting his campaign war chest at around $52 million, the most collected among all the Democratic candidates. An analysis of the contributions shows that the majority of the billionaire donators came from the financial, media and technology sectors.

In something that should surprise no one, Pete Buttigieg’s Monday fundraiser in San Francisco is sold out at the upper-most level ($2,800), which doesn’t happen too often. pic.twitter.com/6YFcbn2yfd

— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) December 13, 2019

Of particular interest, however, is how much the tech titans of Silicon Valley have lavished the democratic frontrunner with attention as well as infusions of hard cash. In December, for example, Rex Reed, co-founder of Netflix, helped organize a fundraising dinner at a wine cellar in Palo Alto, California, which gave Buttigieg’s Democratic opponents a golden opportunity to expose his billionaire connections.

“Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States,” Elizabeth Warren told Buttigieg in a December debate.

Buttigieg responded that he was “literally the only person on this stage who is not a millionaire or a billionaire,” and that therefore Warren had failed the “purity test.”

I find it “Ironic” that suddenly Wine Caves Are The Hot Topic On All News… #WineCaves

The California winemakers who hosted a dinner at a “wine cave” for [D] Con Party presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg are defending the fundraising eventhttps://t.co/VjI26zj41a

— Steven Lundgren (@love4thegameAK) December 22, 2019

It’s not just billionaires, however, who are cracking open their wallets for the Indiana native. The list includes more than 200 foreign policy and intelligence officials, including Anthony Lake, national security adviser for President Clinton, former National Security Council spokesman Ned Price, and former deputy CIA director David Cohen, among many others. Although such support from the foreign policy and intelligence community doesn’t prove cause and effect, it has helped spawn a number of online conspiracy theories that Buttigieg is something of a Manchurian candidate, propped up by a deep state desperate to beat the swamp drainer Donald J. Trump.

Those ideas were brought to a boil during the Iowa caucus when the aptly named app Shadow, designed to perform the simple task of reporting the polling results in a timely and efficient manner, fizzled out just as Bernie Sanders had taken a commanding lead over Buttigieg. Would it come as any surprise that Shadow Inc. has a very shadowy history?

“Shadow Inc. was picked in secret by the Iowa Democratic Party after its leaders consulted with the Democratic National Committee on vetting vendors and security protocols for developing a phone app used to gather and tabulate the caucus results,” AP reported. “Shadow Inc. was launched by ACRONYM, a nonprofit corporation founded in 2017 by Tara McGowan, a political strategist who runs companies aimed at promoting Democratic candidates and priorities.”

McGowan is married to none other than Michael Halle, a senior strategist for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, which records show has also paid Shadow Inc. $42,500 for the use of software.

And people wonder why there are so many ‘conspiracy theorists’ running around these days.

In any case, the glitch led to many days of debate as to who really won the Midwestern state, a debate that continues today. Yet despite that state of mass confusion, Buttigieg didn’t miss an opportunity to seize victory from the claws of (possible) defeat, announcing just hours after the technological breakdown that he had been “victorious” in Iowa. Meanwhile, Sanders’ supporters saw it as yet another brazen move by the DNC to sideline the democratic socialist.

So how does one explain the incredible string of political success for the young star of the Democratic Party? Is he really so politically talented and smart that there was no choice but to let him move to the front of the pack? That seems hard to believe since his speeches come off as hollow and scripted, a rhetorical trick that many politicians with far more experience have perfected. And how about all those billionaires, former state officials and people from the national security apparatus who have come forward to support him? A case of billionaire grassroots democracy in action, or just more good luck for the South Bend native?

As it stands, Pete Buttigieg remains a great mystery, a proverbial dark horse on the U.S. political scene. While there can be no question that he has a long future in American politics, it is too early to tell if that will be a good thing for the American people. There is still a lot of unpacking to do on the life and times of the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

A quarter of a million voters in the little Granite State of New Hampshire put the last nails in her political coffin.

After a year of empty speculation in the U.S. Mainstream Media (MSM) fawningly built up the hollow and fraudulent Warren – she fulfilled her political fate as a badly built giant airship, full of nothing but gas that crashed and burned on her first real test flight, just like her socialist predecessor, Britain’s bizarre R101 more than 90 years ago.

After her rejection by the caucuses of Iowa- who similarly threw out Hillary Clinton in both 2008 and 2016, performing signal services for world peace and survival – Warren knew she had to do better in New Hampshire. But she could not even make the top three candidates among Democratic voters alone and she also failed to break the 15 percent barrier.

Democrats in New Hampshire were even more stunning in their humiliation of veteran national candidate Vice President Joe Biden who led the preferences of national Democratic voters for so long.

Biden’s campaign is plummeting out of control. His vaunted loyal support, among older, white working class and rural Democrats and among Hispanic and African American voters must now kick in across the U.S. South on March 3 – Super Tuesday – or he’s toast.

Biden could yet prove a “Comeback Kid”. Registered Democrats across Heartland America and the great Hispanic and African American communities have so far have shown no enthusiasm at all even for Senator Bernie Sanders – who has won the hearts and minds of students and potential young voters, or of the other two now clear frontrunners, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

The heiresses of Hillary Clinton and other feminist extremists across the United States – the same people who actually believe Russia stole the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump – are truly grieving for Elizabeth Warren.

The Washington Post on the very day of the New Hampshire primary ran a long piece in its Style section lamenting that voters’ rejection of Warren was a judgment on the bigotry of gender-bigoted Americans who were not a ready for a Strong Woman at their head.

As is now usual for the Post, its lies are not only absurd but also incompetent: It was not mainstream American voters who rejected Warren: It was her own liberal Democrats in New Hampshire.

Far from being gender bigoted, those same voters preferred in their top three, an openly gay young mayor (Pete Buttigieg) and another woman (Amy Klobuchar) as well as an elderly Jewish Socialist originally from the borough of Brooklyn in New York City (Bernie Sanders). Not much if any racism or gender hatred there.

However no tears will be shed yet in Langley. Wall Street and the U.S. Deep State would clearly prefer not to have Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States. But so far their efforts to demonize him have failed entirely.

On the other hand, Buttigieg, suddenly the hot commodity to “stop Sanders” has been packaged as the new “moderate” and “bright fresh face.” He came out strong from both Iowa and New Hampshire. And the dynamics of primary politics and favor him.

Taken separately, Iowa and New Hampshire are both extremely low population states and the Iowa caucuses are a bizarre though sweet ceremonial procedure that began before even railroads or electric wire telegraphs had fully come to the Midwest back in the 1840s. The Iowa caucuses are democratic politics as they were conceived in the era of horses and buggies, slaves and serfdom.

However, Iowa and New Hampshire are so different from each other and so far apart that to do strongly in both of them, as Sanders did in 2016 and this year, as Barack Obama did in 2008 and as Donald Trump did in 2016 shows a candidate has the broad appeal to give him or her national credibility.

This year, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Sanders all passed that test in both contests with flying colors. But Warren and Biden both dismally failed to do so.

I regard Buttigieg as an entirely empty figure, another of T S Eliot’s Hollow Men – a Straw Dog. The most chilling thing about him is that despite his utter lack of experience, achievement and substance on every issue, literally scores of senior CIA, NSA and other Deep State officials have enthusiastically endorsed him, as the Grayzone has documented.

The question is Why?

The answer is obvious:

Lovable little Pete Buttigieg is not only a Manchurian Candidate: He is Langley’s Manchurian Candidate.

Buttigieg is far from being an unprecedented phenomenon: Repeatedly, the U.S. establishment tolerates or actively advances a young, inexperienced, supposedly squeaky clean candidate to launch a new era of Instant Happiness and Virtue.

The disgusting little hypocrite Jimmy Carter – who unleashed both the Iraqi attack on Iran and supported the Mujahedeen to start more than 40 years of war in Afghanistan – won the presidency that way in 1976.

Barack Obama rode the popular wave of a similar appeal in 2016.

Having a first woman president is now passé. In fact Klobuchar could certainly do the job credibly, but the ludicrous fiascoes of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren have tarnished her.

Buttigieg offers yet another childish, meaningless “glass ceiling” to be broken in the way so beloved of infantile romantic-liberal Americans. He would be the first gay president! A new Rainbow Coalition! A new way to display imagined U.S. moral superiority over the rest of the world!

Watch for the rise of the pampered little Buttigieg as the brave boy knight in shining armor ventures forth to slay the foolish old raving socialist dragon Bernie Sanders.

It is a ludicrous narrative. It is packed with lies. But it is going to be stuffed down our throats in the months ahead.

If the DNC really has a plan to defeat Trump in 2020, then it isn’t obvious. And that might be a good thing in terms of strategy, but it also makes it a hard sell to voters. What we need to untangle is the mysterious popularity of Biden and Buttigieg, and how these two characters are tightly connected in this race. It goes without saying that these are two very well vetted DNC approved and supported candidates, though the DNC knows they can’t both win.

The alternative though is that the DNC has no plan to beat Trump, and so it isn’t in this for real. Or conversely, this is all a big psy-op to recreate Trump’s campaign against Republicans as a Gabbard campaign against Democrats as the path to the White House – against the system, against the deep state. Gabbard, after all, has been running at least as much against Clinton and the DNC as she has against Trump. She has appeared on conservative news media, an establishment which has been much quicker to incorporate convenient aspects of the new post left-right paradigm politics.

Yes, as an aside, it’s possible that Clinton’s attack on Gabbard was staged. Clinton would have been well advised to know how much she’s reviled, and use that to her advantage. If Gabbard is the DNC sleeper candidate, and Biden is just there for this plot to have an obstacle to arc over, given that the Gabbard character isn’t herself ‘transforming’ as she is a Mary Sue, then indeed it makes sense that Gabbard running against Clinton is a new-fangled DNC plot.

While we need to keep these two possibilities in mind, the more plausible scenario here is that the DNC’s controllers, Clinton and Co., are acting from a place of extreme narcissism and are blinded by hubris.

Did we imagine this could go any other way?  “Hubris”, the pride that comes before the fall, is the primary theme we can apply to this component of the DNC Greek tragedy. Because despite some of the write-ups coming off of the November 20^th debate, Buttigieg has no chance and polling firms like Emerson still have Sanders as the only candidate positioned to defeat Trump. This comes, they note, as impeachment hype on Trump is waning, a good sign for the incumbent.

The facts are troubling for Biden. The New Yorker published an op-ed that Joe Biden ‘Stumbled Again’ in the November 20^th debate. The Washington Post published that Biden was the ‘biggest loser’ in the same debate. The New York Times noted that Biden’s digital footprint was slowly disappearing in mid-September. The more voters are exposed to Biden, the less they like him.

This is why the DNC makes sense with the bizarre campaign of Buttigieg as a subplot for Biden. Without Buttigieg serving a greater purpose in advancing the story overall, this is all an awful lot of character development for someone who is only going to be killed off in the mid-season finale.

Coming off of what was again yet another lackluster ‘performance’ in the DNC candidate’s debate, if this were any other candidate we would have written them off long ago. But what keeps Biden in this race, and what maintains his frontrunner status despite being of little appeal to anyone is the DNC machine itself?

The DNC Does not care about Voters: It’s still Clinton’s Organization

Should Biden steal the nomination from more interesting and engaging, and yes, electable candidates like Sanders, Gabbard, and Yang, we should absolutely expect that Trump holds onto the White House. But the DNC has already doubled-down on who and what they are, and the show must go on. No matter what one may want, how one may identify, the DNC has already made its case to the courts that it views itself as a private corporation.

And so Biden’s continued preeminence in this race is precisely the underlying issue at hand for many Democrat, undecided, and independent voters: the corruption of the DNC goes much deeper than Wasserman Shultz, as explained in the tell-all by former DNC interim National Chair, Donna Brazile. It goes to the fact that a whole consortium of investment firms, media agencies, and related transatlantic NGO and banking institutions all very much need their people – a DNC approved candidate – to win.

But winning requires a candidate with the characteristics of a winner, and so the show’s producers need great talent. The glaring problem is that the show’s directors have confused themselves for the show’s stars. They want to star in this show themselves.

Pete Buttigieg – Biden’s Secret Sauce

Sometimes the way to be more appealing is to stand next to someone who is anything but. We live in an age of explosive productions, big budget media-political synergies, an entire hyper-reality wherein actors like Morgan Freeman make very serious PSA’s saying outright that the U.S. is at war with Russia, and that Trump is a secret Russian pawn. This is the political climate, and these are the stakes. But these DNC directors insist not only on cameos in this blockbuster film, but on playing the leading characters themselves.

This means we are beyond mere corruption, and into the realm of self-destructive hyper-narcissism. For all things told, the DNC could win this, and could have won the last race too. They simply lack any self-reflection, for this would mean that the directors act like directors and control the candidate, as they did with Obama, and not confuse themselves for the talent as they do now.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a fantastic manipulator and a murderous criminal ring leader of global proportions, a fact alone which should explode any old fashioned (or conversely, feminist) bigotry that women aren’t capable of such. But as a candidate and public face, she’s reviled. She’s earned that too, by the way, but this hasn’t stopped her from putting herself out there, to the detriment of her own aims. The sinking of the HRC ship was also the sinking of the DNC ship, and the peak arrogance at the moment of total destruction is the very definition of hubris in Greek tragedies.

This is chiefly why we are being spoon-fed Pete Buttigieg, who is apparently noteworthy for being a politically moderate homosexual, and amazingly still both moderate and homosexual. Really? This is something which has no bearing, indication, or even odor of progressive politics in this (long past) post Harvey Milk political paradigm. If the point here is to establish that a gay candidate can stand for absolutely nothing and also not be particularly offensive to otherwise conservative leaning voters, this point was established much earlier in the plot when even openly gay Republican congressman like Jim Kolbe, Steve Gunderson, Mark Foley, or Michael Huffington found electoral successes. Some of these were decades ago. The list of openly gay Democrat Congressmen is longer, true, but the point here is evident: gay conservatism, log-cabin Republicans, is no new phenomenon. And so a DINO like Buttigieg is about as novel as he is interesting as a candidate.

And that means we need to face the reality that Buttigieg’s being in the race, given his – to put it lightly – lack of qualifications, still points backs to Biden, which in turn points back to Clinton. Yes, it’s already been exposed that Buttigieg’s backers include Silicon Valley players like Facebook who fear a government break-up of its monopoly, but this in turn is only a facet of the DNC support machine itself. But given that this also describes any DNC approved candidate, then this doesn’t tell us enough about why Buttigieg in particular.

That leaves us with the real reason that Buttigieg is still in the race. It’s to push the whole discourse over to the so-called ‘right’, and make Biden look more interesting and ‘populist’.

Though, it would be in error to say ‘to the right’, because this term really means very little and the sort of ‘post-right’ voters that made Trump exciting and memetic are interested in the more post-paradigmatic campaigns of Gabbard and Yang.

Yet certainly Buttigieg’s role is to be so absolutely about nothing that when Biden gestures in some direction which otherwise would be described as feckless and dull, it’s at least more exciting and popular than Buttigieg. So Buttieg’s real role is that of – now for the irony – the straight man in Biden’s comedy. Just a day after the debate, notable ‘black community’ politicians and deal-makers came out supporting Biden over Buttigieg, in Buttigieg’s own South Bend, Indiana turf. This has more to do with Biden’s connection to the DNC and its own black community intersection through the ‘black church’, the NGO sector, and organized labor than with how average black folks consider Biden himself.

Buttigieg maintains composure and resounds a clear dull grey blur of emptiness, which in turn highlights Biden’s own verbalizing, making these appear almost like lofty and idealistic platitudes, even though they aren’t.

There’s even been an attempt to intellectualize what Biden represents, to brand it as ‘restorationist’, as if we are talking about the battle over power in early-mid 19^th century France. The Atlantic piece highlights that he’s the first nominee in ages to openly push to turn the hands of time backwards. Move over House of Bourbon!

Despite all the dressings now, as in 2016, voters just aren’t buying it because there’s no real vision, doesn’t speak to their lived experiences, and it really all means very little. It’s more of the chattering class pretending to be interested in the conversation it’s having with itself.

These are the ugly reasons that independents went over to Trump or just stayed home.  The DNC corruption is only the surface level melanoma of a whole metastasized cancer, and the personage of Clinton only an avatar for a much deeper systemic problem involving many layers and facets ranging from unemployment to the growing surveillance and police-state.

If not narcissism, then what?

There may just be a method to this madness however. If the DNC strategy for getting their candidate elected next year is somehow based in maintaining a high level of public engagement simply on the absurdity factor alone, then perhaps they are onto something. Because the ineluctability of Biden together with the high number of candidates still in the running absolutely makes this nomination process an eyebrow raising one, and has at the very least kept us all guessing. But not all cliffhangers are captivating, and indeed can ultimately turn audiences off if done badly.

The DNC needs to replace its showrunners, the present ones probably simply know where the bodies are buried. While corruption is a rather normal fact of life, and campaigns to eradicate it always fail, there is a major difference between controlled corruption and rampant corruption. Society is the art of clear-headed people managing, and making productive for all, that never-ending pushing and yearning for more which sociopaths and similar extreme narcissists have. Society collapses when those narcissists themselves take over. American society probably already collapsed, but the collapse of the DNC is already an obituary listing in a yellowed newspaper.

The woefully underqualified and underwhelming Mayor Buttigieg, known for his absolute inability to inspire anyone, seems only to be in the race to create the illusion that Biden has something radical to say. This alone says more than we need to know about Biden himself.

Among the top three in the polling — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren — only Biden is among the top five in the number of billionaires who have backed him, and each of the other four candidates scores higher than Biden does in the number of billionaire backers. Furthermore, Biden is sinking in the polls. Consequently, Democratic Party billionaires are increasingly worrying that their Party might end up nominating for the Presidency someone whom they won’t support. That person would be Sanders. And the Democratic National Committee — which relies heavily upon its billionaire backers in order to be able to win elections (just as the Republican National Committee relies upon Republican billionaire backers in order to win) — is terrified by this possibility (alienating its Party’s crucial moneybags).

The saving grace for these billionaires (and for the DNC) increasingly seems likely to be Senator Warren’s candidacy, which draws support away from Sanders, and therefore gives Buttigieg a chance ultimately to win the nomination.

On August 27th, the top website for Democratic Party activists, Political Wire, headlined “Warren Overtakes Biden as Most Favorable Candidate”, and reported that not only does Warren now edge out both Biden and Sanders in net favorability rating, and top the entire field of candidates in that extremely important measure, but Warren is overwhelmingly the most frequently mentioned second choice of Democratic Party primary voters, which means that not only would the voters who intend to vote for her in the primary be delighted if she were to become the Democratic nominee — this outcome would also likeliest produce the most-unified Party going into the general election. This, in turn, would mean that Democratic Party billionaires, instead of Republican Party billionaires, would almost certainly control the country after 2020 — the country would be controlled by people such as Thomas Steyer and Donald Sussman, instead of by people such as Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer. It would be a different ‘democracy’, but not really much different; it would be like the difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama — it would be different in rhetoric and bumper-stickers, but very similar in actual policies. (For examples: whereas Bush invaded and destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama invaded and destroyed Libya and Syria; and, all the while, both of them supported the Sauds and Israel; and, moreover, both of them supported Wall Street, though Obama tongue-lashed them, which Bush didn’t.) So: though the rhetoric is sometimes different, the basic policies aren’t. The policies of Republican billionaires and of Democratic billionaires are basically similar.

As of just a few weeks ago, the Democratic Party’s five top U.S. Presidential candidates, in terms of whom had been backed the most strongly by America’s billionaires, were, in order from the top: Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Michael Bennett, and Joe Biden. Warren was 12th down from Buttigieg’s #1 position, in support from the billionaires. Sanders was at the very bottom — zero billionaires backing him (he was the only one of the 17 reporting candidates who had no billionaire backer).

The Democratic Party’s billionaires are just crazy about Buttigieg, but the question right now is whom will they choose to be running against him during the decisive final round of the primaries? Would they rather it be Sanders? Or instead Warren?

They definitely prefer Warren. Her recent soaring poll-numbers are raising her support, from them, so strongly that the neoconservative-neoliberal (i.e., pro-billionaire) David Bradley’s The Atlantic magazine headlined on August 26th, “Elizabeth Warren Manages to Woo the Democratic Establishment”. This magazine reported (to use my language, not theirs) that the rats from the sinking ship Joe Biden have begun to jump onboard the U.S.S. Elizabeth Warren’s rising ship, which might already be tied even-steven with the other two leading ships, of Biden and of Sanders. Since Sanders is the only American Presidential candidate whom no billionaire supports, there are strong indications that Warren is drawing some of them away from Biden. This could turn the nominating contest into, ultimately, Buttigieg versus Warren (both of whom are acceptable to billionaires), instead of into Buttigieg versus Sanders (which would pose the threat to them of producing a Sanders Presidency). There is little reason to think that Buttigieg will decline to the #2 position in billionaires’ support; but, if this contest turns into Sanders v. Buttigieg, instead of into Warren v. Buttigieg, then Democratic Party billionaires not only would pour even more money into Buttigieg’s campaign against Sanders, but they would likely end up donating to the Republican Presidential nominee in 2020 if Sanders ends up beating Buttigieg (as polls indicate he almost certainly would). By contrast, if this nominating contest ends up being between Warren v. Buttigieg, then the Party’s billionaires wouldn’t likely switch to supporting the Republican Presidential nominee — they’d continue donating to the Democratic Party, regardless of which of those two candidates wins the nomination, in order to defeat Trump (or whomever the Republican nominee turns out to be), and take the control of the country away from Republican billionaires (as it now is).

Therefore, David Bradley’s propaganda organs are turned on, really hot, by Lizzie. For some typical examples, at Bradley’s biggest-circulation one, The Atlantic, its recent stories gushing about her have been headlined: “Elizabeth Warren Had Charisma, and Then She Ran for President”, and “Elizabeth Warren’s Big Night”, and “The Activist Left Already Knows Who It Wants for President”. For example: the last-mentioned of those articles was about “Netroots Nation, a conference that’s been around since the early 2000s,” which “is run by the liberal political blog Daily Kos.” Here’s what it hides: Daily Kos was founded and owned by the CIA asset and El Salvadorian aristocrat Markos Moulitsas, a ‘former’ Republican far-right person, who set up his website in 2002 and suddenly specialized in fooling progressive Democrats to endorse whomever the billionaire-run Democratic National Committee wants them to support. Unlike David Bradley’s ‘moderate’-Democrat rags, Moulitsas’s ‘progressive’-Democrat rag, Daily Kos, targets to make suckers of Democrats who might vote in the primaries for people that the billionaires actually fear — and that’s now especially Sanders — in order to turn them instead toward favoring the ‘mainstream’, ‘more electable’, Democratic Party candidates (such as Biden, Buttigieg, and Harris — not David Bradley’s darling as Buttigieg’s stalking horse, Warren). In 2016, that ‘mainstream’ was Hillary Clinton (whom the DNC had rigged the primaries to ‘win’ against Sanders), but more recently it was Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg; and, now, this ‘mainstream’ is starting to include (from the billionaires’ standpoint) Elizabeth Warren. That’s because Warren is vastly more preferred by billionaires than is Sanders, and so they want the Party’s progressives to choose her, instead of Sanders, so that the final Democratic Presidential contest will be between Warren versus the billionaires’ actual favorite, which is Buttigieg. If they can’t get him, at least they can get her, the Party’s billionaires clearly now are hoping.

On April 19th, Jonathan Martin headlined in the New York Times, “‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum”, and he opened:

“When Leah Daughtry, a former Democratic Party official, addressed a closed-door gathering of about 100 wealthy liberal donors in San Francisco last month, all it took was a review of the 2020 primary rules to throw a scare in them. … “I think I freaked them out,” Ms. Daughtry recalled with a chuckle, an assessment that was confirmed by three other attendees. They are hardly alone. … But stopping Mr. Sanders … could prove difficult for Democrats.

Martin went on to say:

His strength on the left gives him a real prospect of winning the Democratic nomination and could make him competitive for the presidency if his economic justice message resonates in the Midwest as much as Mr. Trump’s appeals to hard-edge nationalism did in 2016. And for many Sanders supporters, the anxieties of establishment Democrats are not a concern.

That prospect is spooking establishment-aligned Democrats. …

David Brock, the liberal organizer [founder of the Media Matters anti-progressive Democratic Party website against Republicans], … said he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence “sooner rather than later.” …

Howard Wolfson [here’s the wiki on him], who spent months immersed in Democratic polling and focus groups on behalf of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, had a blunt message for Sanders skeptics: “People underestimate the possibility of him becoming the nominee at their own peril.” …

The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz [the billionaire former Vice Chairman of Lockheed Martin]. …

[Rufus] Gifford [former President Barack Obama’s 2012 finance director, who] … has gone public in recent days with his dismay over major Democratic fund-raisers remaining on the sidelines, said of Mr. Sanders, “I feel like everything we are doing is playing into his hands.”

But the peril of rallying the party’s elite donor class against a candidate whose entire public life has been organized around confronting concentrated wealth is self-evident: Mr. Sanders would gleefully seize on any Stop Bernie effort.

“You can see him reading the headlines now,” Mr. Brock mused: “‘Rich people don’t like me.’”

So: the rise of Elizabeth Warren gives the billionaires a ‘progressive’ candidate who might either win the nomination or else at least split progressive voters during the primaries (between Sanders and Warren) and thus give the nomination to Buttigieg, who is their first choice (especially since both Biden and Harris have been faltering so badly of late).

This explains the gushings for Warren, at such neocon rags as The Atlantic, The New Republic, New Yorker, and Mother Jones. It’s being done in order to set up the final round, so as for its outcome to be acceptable to the billionaires who fund the Democratic Party. Her record in the U.S. Senate is consistently in support of U.S. invasions, coups, and sanctions against countries that have never invaded nor even threatened to invade the U.S., such as Venezuela, Palestine, Syria, and Iran; she’s 100% a neocon (just like G.W. Bush, Obama and Trump were/are); and, to billionaires, that is even more important than her policy-record regarding Wall Street is, because the Military Industrial Complex, which she represents, is even more important to enforcing and spreading the U.S. megacorporate empire than the investment-firms are. So, whereas they would be able to deal with Warren, they wouldn’t be able to deal with Sanders, whose policy-record is remarkably progressive in all respects, and not only on domestic U.S. matters. Whereas the public pay attention virtually only to domestic matters, billionaires care even more about foreign than about domestic affairs — and this fact — more than anything else — makes Sanders utterly unacceptable to them. Under a President Warren, America’s string of invasions, coups, and economic blockades (sanctions) would continue; but, under a President Sanders, all of that wasted money would be spent instead on improving the lives of the American people, rather than on destroying the lives of the residents in those foreign lands so as to conquer those lands in the name of advancing ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ there and of ‘defending America’ against ‘enemies’ who never even have threatened us. This con is the reality that both the Democratic and the Republican sides of The Establishment (the collective operation of all billionaires and their ‘news’-media and think tanks, etc.) constantly hide from the public. And that is why, for example, America went from invading Iraq on the basis of lies in 2003, to invading Libya on the basis of lies in 2011, and Syria on the basis of lies in 2013-, and maybe Venezuela and Iran on the basis of lies after the upcoming Presidential ‘election’.