March 2019

Those darned emails -- the exhibition

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Neoliberal artist Kenneth Goldsmith has a new exhibit opening in Venice called HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails.
A press pack is available via the commercialized sharing platform Dropbox.
Using "techniques of appropriation and collage," Goldsmith prints out the emails that Clinton sequestered on a private server when she was ostensibly working for the American taxpayer. The show is not a criticism of this dicey activity but rather an attempt to shift the blame for her 2016 election loss back to the email server controversy, just as the Russian collusion narrative is dying an ignoble death. As the press release explains:

The almost 60,000 pages of [Clinton email] documentation are printed in double copy and are on display in the gallery and in the lobby on the second floor of Despar Teatro Italia. The pile of papers is rather unimpressive, rebutting Trump’s efforts to make them monumental. In this way, Goldsmith creates the greatest poem of the 21st century, an anti-monument to the folly of the heinous smear campaign against Clinton.

The gallerygoer is supposed to be impressed by this unimpressive pile of paper, sufficiently to rethink the election. Perhaps we can look forward to a future exhibition from Goldsmith documenting Clinton's unimpressive speeches to investment bankers, the mere millions in "speaking fees" she received in advance of the contest, or evidence of the sheer underwhelmingness of the failed state she helped to create in Libya!

goldsmith450w

underwhelming, but pretty

death of a silly story

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Now that DC hack Mueller says he has nothing on the supposed Russian collusion that supposedly lost Clinton the election, am waiting for those emails from friends and former friends saying, "Damn, Tom, you called it right two years ago." Meanwhile, I-told-you-sos from other shot callers have been mounting up:

Rob Urie (probably the best and most heartfelt):

The Clinton campaign’s decision to blame her electoral loss on Russian interference demonstrates why she was, and still is, unqualified to hold elected office. In the first, the U.S. – Russian rivalry is backed-up by hair-trigger nuclear arsenals that could end the world in a matter of minutes. Inciting tensions based on self-serving lies is stunningly reckless. In the second, the claim demonstrates utter contempt for her most loyal followers by feeding them purposely misleading explanations of the loss. And most damagingly for political opponents of Donald Trump, these actions give credence to the insurgent status of his retro-Republicanism against liberal and left defenders of the political establishment.

Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois, many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that, is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it were true knowledge.

Matt Taibbi

Aaron Maté (video)

C.J. Hopkins

Bernard

Caitlin Johnstone

Jimmy Dore videos (humorous gloating) 1 / 2 (Rachel Maddow) / 3 (laughing at Keith Olbermann rants)