How politics is done, 2018

Much as the royal houses of Europe once made common cause against the people, whom they used to make war on each other, today's global elite engage in politics that won't stand the light of day. Won't? Shouldn't.

Erik Prince, a mercenary who made hundreds of millions off of the misbegotten Iraq War via Blackwater, now works in China. His patriotism is not for the nation of America. It's for his moneyed social class, including his incompetent sister Betsy DeVos.

Israeli intelligence operatives have been digging dirt on officials who worked the Iran nuclear arms deal. And their wives!

As Laura Rozen, a foreign policy journalist, reported, the woman who emailed Kahl’s wife claimed to work for Reuben Capital Partners. That’s the same fake firm that a female operative for the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube used as a cover when she spied on the actress Rose McGowan for Harvey Weinstein.

It's not partisan. It's about the real deep state, the power elite. It's about people who never bear any lasting consequences of their crimes, as limned in Frank Rich's story of the New York establishment that has given us Donald Fucking Trump.

Cambridge Analytica, now closing only surely to be reopened in another city under another name, drove data into the Trump campaign that helped it squeak over the line. Financed by Robert and Rebekah Mercer, deep in the klepto-capitalist internationale...

And, of course, Trump's admiration of and simpering to Vladimir Putin, despite Putin's being in charge only of a declining neo-tsarist empire whose oil and gas are less valuable and whose people are drinking themselves to death. But Putin has leverage and juice, and he's rich and powerful.

The world is being stolen out from under us, just when it appeared that the consent of the governed might matter everywhere.

But this dirty, devious game of lies and deceit in service of the global elite of wealth is how politics is done now. We liberals had better get with the program, or we'll look ever more like the Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters.