Noem's "perfect" kill, Powell's perfect assault, Ruffalo's perfect summation
PM Carpenter
Sunday provided America with two videos for the ages. The second, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s, is titled, A Watershed Moment in the Taking Down of Trump; season one, episode one.
The first video, CNN Jake Tapper’s interview of Kristi Noem, is titled, For Viewers on Smack, a Fourth Reich Minister Clarifies; second take, season one, episode unnumbered (among thousands).
Noem’s performance is easily summarized. Throughout the ages, no tyrant or subordinate thereof ever failed to push the rhetoric of repetition — despotism’s opium, the rabble’s fix. Clearly, Reich Minister Noem did her homework. From the video’s transcript:
“Everything that I have said has been proven to be factual”; “everything that we have stated has been factual”; “the facts of the situation are …”; “you don’t get to change the facts just because you don’t like them“; “those officers had gotten the facts”; “it absolutely is the facts”; “the facts are …”; “I'm getting the facts”; “that's factual”; “I would appreciate everybody sticking to the facts”; “AOC [had no] facts”; “I have provided you with facts,” and …
“In fact, a lot of people called this situation something very different and untruthful.” Yes they did.
Is the rabble, i.e., MAGA, at all uneasy about Ms. Gnome’s conduct? We go to the streets, where one of its sites rationalizes her and other cabinet secretaries’ televised, reality-reinventions of pure dope: “[They] reframe biased questions and push it right back to the reporters.” So says America’s population of needle tracks.
The clean and sober crowd has had enough. All along, there has been pushback, of course. We’ve seen it erupt in institutional and individual resistance to what began as manifestly hovering despotism to, in less than one full year, its sweeping entrenchment — a grotesquery questioned by only the blinkered and brain-fogged.
But what erupted before shall forever be remembered as the stuff of teapots and tempests.
No one expected the cautious technocrat, bureaucratic diplomat and lifelong dandy Jerome H. Powell to bust from the muted wings of armed resistance like a divine General Patton and start blasting away. In a 2-minute blitzkrieg OF THIS SHIT STOPS HERE AND NOW, he aimed straight at the forehead of Donald Trump.
You want context, Kristi? Powell shotgunned it: “pressure,” “intimidation,” now “threats of criminal charges” from an authoritarian moron demanding that the Federal Reserve do to the U.S. economy what he bizarrely, impossibly yet in fact did to a fucking guaranteed cash machine called a casino.
Powell’s forceful counterattack inspired the Fed’s living former chairs to join the assault, declaring in a joint statement that Trump’s stupidity and oppressive tactics are “how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions.” In brief, banana republics led by faux-bemedaled imbeciles.
It gets worse.
Former chair Janet Yellen began with a specific and ended with a generalization: “The fact that he is willing to go that far to intimidate a Fed official suggests he’s going to stop at nothing to get his way with respect to Fed policy. If you can bring charges for no reason whatsoever against your enemies, we’re no longer living in a society governed by the rule of law.”
Note Yellen’s smooth segue, if/can. The first is probingly conditional; the second observes the unGnomic, factual fact of a post-Weimar U.S. — a state infinitely more ominous than some waxed-mustachioed caudillo’s fiefdom.
Sunday was capped by actor Mark Ruffalo delivering a few more specifics.
Jerome Powell is thinking every word of Ruffalo’s wrap-up. He somewhat more gently articulated the actor’s sentiment, but coming from the chairman of the historically staid Federal Reserve, Powell’s remarks were tantamount to a blistering broadside.
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