ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

No matter how your day is going, it could always be worse.  You could be a writer for Common Dreams.  "There's generally a recent Common Dreams column available to provide comic relief on what is turning into an unedifying election season."

What's particularly unedifying is that their contributors seem to take their lunacy seriously.  Here's Joseph Gerson at the end of last month.

We are weeks away from the seminal U.S. election which will determine if the U.S. opts for a counterrevolutionary white, Christian nationalist, and plutocratic dictatorship or a compromised version of social democracy. After the month-long torment of the nation twisting in the wind as U.S. President Joe Biden resisted pressures to step aside following his disastrous debate performance, the torch of leadership of the Democratic Party has been passed to Vice President Kamala Harris.

"Counterrevolutionary" refers to tightening the borders, rolling back the nanny state, and encouraging energy security at home and national security worldwide.  You know, median voter stuff.

That, though, is not what the Common Dreams element of the Democrat base wants.

After blessings from the Obamas, for whom she campaigned during the 2008 primary campaign, she brings the excitement of African American and South Asian accents to her campaigning, signaling support for greater social and economic justice, while committing to history’s most powerful military force, including military alliances, and harping on inflated Russian and Chinese threats.

Worth noting was the scholar Peter Beinart’s observation that there was a false and potentially crippling ring to the convention’s central theme of FREEDOM. Israeli and Jewish pain were legitimately placed on prime time display with the speech by the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American who was wounded and taken hostage in Hamas’ despicable October 7 massacre. But amid protests over the failure of the Biden administration to exercise the leverage it has over Israel to force a cease-fire, the Harris-Walz camp refused to similarly humanize and display Palestinian pain amidst Israel’s genocidal war against Gazans. That. Beinart noted, gave lie to the party’s commitments to equality and could cost it votes in this critically important election.

Right, the Biden family might be on the Chinese payroll, the foreign policy establishment is fighting to the last Ukrainian for regime change in Russia, or something,  the Democrats have to somehow win Minnesota and Michigan to install the latest figurehead, and, apart from abortion, freedom is just another word for more mandates and more taxes to pay.

In fact, that passage isn't hysterical enough.  There's more.

For the past year it has been apparent that the only way to prevent a Trump dictatorship is to prevent his return to the White House. With the Supreme Court now fully controlled by extreme right wing—racist and fascist operatives who on July 1 granted presidents near-total immunity from prosecution—it has been clear that our constitutional guardrails are insufficient to contain Donald Trump and the counterrevolutionary MAGA movement. Despite his historic legislative successes in rebooting the U.S. economy, the obvious decline of Biden’s physical and intellectual facilities generated severe doubts among many Democrats that President Biden could prevent a Trump-MAGA political tsunami. Only Dean Phillips, a little known Democratic congressman, had the gumption to state that the emperor had no clothes and to, Don Quixote-like, challenge him in primary elections. Many hoped and did what little they could to encourage the Democratic Establishment to intervene and replace him as the party’s candidate while celebrating Biden’s undeniable economic and social policy accomplishments.

That didn’t happen.

Despite our movements’ challenges to Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu amid the Gaza genocide, his refusal to force a cease-fire in Ukraine and negotiations with Russia for a neutral and secure Ukraine, and his ratcheting up of the military and economic confrontations with China, a Biden election victory was seen by many as the desperately needed compromise to avoid a Trump dictatorship.

There they go again with the "historic legislative successes" (buying off favored constituents is more like it) and "rebooting the economy" (the private sector gains are in the free states, while over 100% of the job gains reported in Illinois are government employees) while the nation building wars go on and on and the Afghans stage a victory parade with stolen government issue materiel, courtesy of Dementia Joe's bug-out.

Never change, Common Dreams.