Editor's note: A Berkeley, Calif., rally organized by a right-wing group turned violent Sunday after arrival of a group that carried an anarchist banner.

Behind the rhetoric of the "alt-right" about white nativism and protecting American traditions, history and Christian values is the lust for violence. Behind the rhetoric of antifa, the Black Bloc and the so-called "alt-left" about capitalism, racism, state repression and corporate power is the same lust for violence.

The two opposing groups, largely made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war. Their lives, battered by economic misery and social marginalization, have suddenly been filled with meaning. They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed. They arrogate to themselves the right to use force to silence those they define as the enemy. They sanctify anger. They are infected with the dark, adrenaline-driven urge for confrontation that arises among the disenfranchised when a democracy ceases to function. They are separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote of those who engage in fratricide, by the "narcissism of minor differences." They mirror each other, not only ideologically but also physically-armed and dressed in black, the color of fascism and the color of death.

It was inevitable that we would reach this point. The corporate state has seized and corrupted all democratic institutions, including the two main political parties, to serve the interests of corporate power and maximize global corporate profits. There is no justice in the courts. There is no possibility for reform in the legislative bodies. The executive branch is a dysfunctional mess headed by a narcissistic kleptocrat, con artist and pathological liar. Money has replaced the vote. The consent of the governed is a joke. Our most basic constitutional rights, including the rights to privacy and due process, have been taken from us by judicial fiat. The economically marginalized, now a majority of the country, have been rendered invisible by a corporate media dominated by highly paid courtiers spewing out meaningless political and celebrity gossip and trivia as if it were news. The corporate state, unimpeded, is pillaging and looting the carcass of the country and government, along with the natural world, for the personal gain of the 1 percent. It daily locks away in cages the poor, especially poor people of color, discarding the vulnerable as human refuse.

A government that is paralyzed and unable and unwilling to address the rudimentary needs of its citizens, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as history has shown with the Weimar Republic and czarist Russia, eventually empowers violent extremists. Economic and social marginalization is the lifeblood of extremist groups. Without it they wither and die. Extremism, as the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote, is "a refuge from the terrors of inner life."

Germany's Nazi stormtroopers had their counterparts in that nation's communist Alliance of Red Front Fighters. The far-right anti-communist death squad Alliance of Argentina had its counterpart in the guerrilla group the People's Revolutionary Army during the "Dirty War." The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels during the war I covered in El Salvador had their counterparts in the right-wing death squads, whose eventual demise seriously impeded the FMLN's ability to recruit. The Serbian nationalists, or Chetniks, in Yugoslavia had their counterparts in the Croatian nationalists, or Ustase. The killing by one side justifies the killing by the other. And the killing is always sanctified in the name of each side's martyrs.

The violence by antifa-short for anti-fascist or anti-fascist action-in Charlottesville, Va., saw a surge in interest and support for the movement, especially after the murder of Heather Heyer. The Black Bloc was applauded by some of the counterprotesters in Boston during an alt-right rally there Aug. 19. In Charlottesville, antifa activists filled the vacuum left by a passive police force, holding off neo-Nazi thugs who threatened Cornel West and clergy who were protesting against the white nationalist event. This was a propaganda coup for antifa, which seeks to portray its use of violence as legitimate self-defense. Protecting West and the clergy members from physical assault was admirable. But this single act no more legitimizes antifa violence than the turkeys, Christmas gifts and Fourth of July fireworks that John Gotti gave to his neighbors legitimized the violence of the Gambino crime family. Antifa, like the alt-right, is the product of a diseased society.

The white racists and neo-Nazis may be unsavory, but they too are victims. They too lost jobs and often live in poverty in deindustrialized wastelands. They too often are plagued by debt, foreclosures, bank repossessions and inability to repay student loans. They too often suffer from evictions, opioid addictions, domestic violence and despair. They too sometimes face bankruptcy because of medical bills. They too have seen social services gutted, public education degraded and privatized and the infrastructure around them decay. They too often suffer from police abuse and mass incarceration. They too are often in despair and suffer from hopelessness. And they too have the right to free speech, however repugnant their views.

Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher forms of control and expand the powers of internal security. When antifa assumes the right to curtail free speech it becomes a weapon in the hands of its enemies to take that freedom away from everyone, especially the anti-capitalists.

The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous building of relationships and alternative institutions and community organizing that alone will make effective resistance possible. We will defeat the corporate state only when we take back and empower our communities, as is happening with Cooperation Jackson, a grass-roots cooperative movement in Jackson, Miss. As long as acts of resistance are forms of personal catharsis, the corporate state is secure. Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.

"Politics isn't made of individuals," Sophia Burns writes in "Catharsis Is Counter-Revolutionary."https://godsandradicals.org/2017/08/09/catharsis-is-counter-revolutionary/ "It's made of classes. Political change doesn't come from feeling individually validated. It comes from collective action and organization within the working class. That means creating new institutions that meet our needs and defend against oppression."

The protests by the radical left now sweeping America, as Aviva Chomsky points out, are too often little more than self-advertisements for moral purity. They are products of a social media culture in which each of us is the star of his or her own life movie. They are infected with the American belief in regeneration through violence and the cult of the gun. They represent a clash between the bankruptcy of identity politics, which produced, as Dr. West has said, a president who was "a black mascot for Wall Street," and the bankruptcy of a white, Christianized fascism that produced Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

"Rather than organizing for change, individuals seek to enact a statement about their own righteousness," Chomsky writes in "How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence." "They may boycott certain products, refuse to eat certain foods, or they may show up to marches or rallies whose only purpose is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the participants. White people may loudly claim that they recognize their privilege or declare themselves allies of people of color or other marginalized groups. People may declare their communities 'no place for hate.' Or they may show up at counter-marches to 'stand up' to white nationalists or neo-Nazis. All of these types of 'activism' emphasize self-improvement or self-expression rather than seeking concrete change in society or policy. They are deeply, and deliberately, apolitical in the sense that they do not seek to address issues of power, resources, decision making, or how to bring about change."

The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anti-capitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled, after all, by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism. It has huge media platforms. It has placed its ideologues and sympathizers in positions of power, including in law enforcement and the military. And it has carried out acts of domestic terrorism that dwarf anything carried out by the left. White supremacists were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks in the United States from 2006 to 2016, far more than those committed by members of any other extremist group, according to a report issued in May by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anti-capitalist uprising, to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all anti-capitalists.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center states categorically in its pamphlet "Ten Ways to Fight Hate," "Do not attend a hate rally."

"Find another outlet for anger and frustration and for people's desire to do something," it recommends. "Hold a unity rally or parade to draw media attention away from hate. Hate has a First Amendment right. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutional right of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups to hold rallies and say whatever they want. Communities can restrict group movements to avoid conflicts with other citizens, but hate rallies will continue. Your efforts should focus on channeling people away from hate rallies."

The Nazis were as unsavory to the German political and economic elites as Donald Trump is to most Americans who hold power or influence. But the German elites chose to work with the fascists, whom they naively thought they could control, rather than risk a destruction of capitalism. Street brawls, actively sought out by the Nazis, always furthered the interests of the fascists, who promised to restore law and order and protect traditional values. The violence contributed to their mystique and the yearning among the public for a strongman who would impose stability.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer writes:

Violent confrontations with antifascists gave the Nazis a chance to paint themselves as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left. They seized it.

It worked. We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding [a Berlin neighborhood]. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn't seem to matter.

One of Hitler's biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence.

The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed. Take away a person's dignity, agency and self-esteem and this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives, lives that are getting steadily worse.

The ecocide by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries alone makes revolt a moral imperative. The question is how to make it succeed. Taking to the street to fight fascists ensures our defeat. Antifa violence, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is a "major gift to the right, including the militant right." It fuels the right wing's paranoid rants about the white race being persecuted and under attack. And it strips anti-capitalists of their moral capital.

Many in the feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply complicit in the corporate assault on the country and embracing the dead end of identity politics, will seek to regain credibility by defending the violence by groups such as antifa. Natasha Lennard, for example, in The Nation calls the "video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face" an act of "kinetic beauty." She writes "if we recognize fascism in Trump's ascendance, our response must be anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but direct, aggressive confrontation."

This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the core of these movements. It saturates the vocabulary of the right-wing corporate oligarchs, including Donald Trump. Talk like this poisons national discourse. It dehumanizes whole segments of the population. It shuts out those who speak with nuance and compassion, especially when they attempt to explain the motives and conditions of opponents. It thrusts the society into a binary and demented universe of them and us. It elevates violence to the highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism and self-reflection. It is the prelude to widespread suffering and death. And that, I fear, is where we are headed.
(c) 2017 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Keep up with Chris Hedges' latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris-hedges.

THE SPECTACLE is almost bizarre: a political party refuses to accept new members. And not just a few individuals, but tens of thousands. And not just any party, but the Likud ("Unification"), the main force in Israel's governing coalition.

Strange? But there is method in this madness. It may soon come before Israel's highest court.

The present leaders of the party, Binyamin Netanyahu and his fellows, are afraid that the people who are now seeking to register as Likud members are really settlers in the occupied territories, who want to take over the Likud, while in practice remaining loyal to their own parties, which are even more extremist.

One of the present Likud members of the Knesset has submitted a bill that may well be unique in the world. It arises from the fear that these new Likud members will not vote for the Likud in the general elections. To counter this possibility, the bill says that when a new member registers in the Likud party, their name will be struck from the general election voter registry, and they will be recorded as having voted for the Likud.

This is manifestly unconstitutional, since it negates the secrecy of the ballot. The legal advisor of the Knesset will probably block it. If not, it will go to the Supreme Court.

This all shows that the Likud is really a curious kind of bird. And not from today.

YEARS AGO, a leading French journalist came to me during an Israeli election campaign. I directed him to an election rally of Menachem Begin's.

When he came back he was bewildered. "I don't understand it," he exclaimed. "When he was talking about the Arabs, he sounded like a rabid fascist. When he was talking about social affairs, he sounded like a moderate liberal. How can this fit together?"

"Begin is not a great thinker," I explained to him. "All the ideology of the Likud goes back to Vladimir Jabotinsky." Vladimir (or Ze'ev) Jabotinsky was the founder of the "revisionist" party, the parent of the Herut Party, which was the parent of the present-day Likud. He was born in 1880 in Odessa in the Ukraine. When he was young man he was sent as a journalist to Italy, a country that had attained its freedom not so long before.

The Italian liberation movement was an unusual mixture of extreme patriotism and liberal social ideas. This fixed the young Jabotinsky's political outlook for life.

He was a very captivating person, extremely gifted in several fields. He wrote a novel (about the Biblical hero Samson), translated Edgar Allen Poe's poems into Hebrew, was a brilliant orator and gifted journalist, wrote songs and much more. In World War I he helped form Jewish battalions in the British army and was a junior officer in the conquest of Palestine.

A few years later the British partitioned Palestine and set up the separate Arab emirate of Transjordan. Jabotinsky objected and founded the ultra-Zionist "Revisionist Party", which demanded the "revision" of this decision.

Jabotinsky loathed the dour, socialist "pioneers" who dominated the Zionist community in Palestine and who hated him. I suspect that he was not too unhappy when the British kicked him out of the country. David Ben-Gurion called him "fascist" - though, as an Italy-lover, Jabotinsky loathed Benito Mussolini.

During those years Jabotinsky was a globe-trotting agitator, who wrote a weekly article which I read piously. I admired his clear, logical style. His movement grew in several countries, especially Poland.

IN PALESTINE, Jabotinsky's Revisionist movement remained a small and isolated minority. However, when violent Jewish-Arab clashes broke out, his movement established the Irgun, an armed underground organization. Jabotinsky was its nominal commander-in-chief. Largely because of him, I joined when I was hardly 15 years old.

In early 1939, Jabotinsky's followers around the world assembled in Warsaw. The clouds of war were already gathering, but Jabotinsky proclaimed that war was impossible - modern arms were much too murderous. When one of his Polish followers, a youngster called Menachem Begin, dared to contradict him, the leader acidly responded: "Sir, if I had your convictions, I would jump into the Vistula!"

However, World War II did indeed break out. Jabotinsky fled to the US, were he died aged 59 of a heart attack. Begin, who had not jumped into the river, eventually reached Palestine and was appointed commander of the Irgun, which became one of the most successful terrorist organizations in the world.

WHEN THE State of Israel was born, Begin became the leader of the opposition and a stickler for democracy. He discarded the "revisionist" party and created his own Herut ("Freedom") party, at the head of which he lost eight consecutive election campaigns.

When he reached power at last, in 1977, he surprised the world by making peace with Egypt, the most powerful Arab country. I was not surprised at all.

Begin was not a brilliant personality like Jabotinsky. He followed his master religiously. Jabotinsky's ideology was geographical: "Eretz Israel on both sides of the Jordan." The map did not include the Sinai peninsula, so Begin had no qualms about giving it back to Egypt. (It also did not include the Golan heights, which Begin would have returned to Syria without hesitation.)

With time, Begin and his followers forgot about the land beyond the Jordan river. They still sang the song written by Jabotinsky ("The Jordan has two banks - the one belongs to us and so does the other"), but realpolitik is stronger than songs. The Kingdom of Jordan is now one of Israel's most important allies, and Israel has saved it from extinction several times.

However, the claim that Jordan, like the West Bank, must be part of the Jewish State appears prominently in the Likud party program. Everybody had forgotten this long ago, until this week.

Binyamin Netanyahu's assistants, who are fighting to prevent the "new applicants" from becoming members of their party, demand that they declare their full acceptance of all parts of the official Likud program - including the demand that Jordan become a part of Israel.

AS A personality, Netanyahu is far below Begin, much as Begin was far below Jabotinsky. There never was a whiff of personal misbehavior about Begin, who was famous for his modest standard life-style, after risking his life every minute for years. Netanyahu is surrounded by a strong smell of corruption. Several investigations against him and his wife Sarah are in progress, each of which could well land him in prison.

Jabotinsky would have looked upon him with disgust.

However...

A Jewish joke tells about the death of the rich man in the ghetto. According to custom, somebody had to eulogize him, presenting him positively. Nobody could be found to fulfill this duty. At long last, one man volunteered.

"We all know that Rabbi Moshe was a loathsome person," he said, "stinking rich, mean and cruel. But compared to his son, he was an angel!"

Something like this is happening in Israel now. The spotlight is on Ya'ir, Netanyahu's 26-year old elder son.

"Bibi" has already been in power for 12 nonconsecutive years and behaves like a king. "Sarah'le", his wife, behaves like a queen, in the style of Marie-Antoinette. In popular parlance, Ya'ir is the "crown-prince".

A very unruly prince. He lives with his parents in the official residence and behaves like a spoiled brat. He is trailed everywhere by bodyguards provided by the state. He has no visible job. And during the last few days, he has become notorious.

Like Donald the Trump, Ya'ir spews abusive comments in all directions on the internet. For example, he calls "The New Israel Fund", a foundation that supports leftist groups, "The New Fund for the Destruction of Israel."

The landscape of the United States is littered with physical testimony to the nation's origins as a white settler colonial outpost of land pirates who exterminated and enslaved their way to global capitalist empire. Purging the evidence of historical crimes is a great catharsis, especially for the victims of U.S. "Manifest Destiny." However, this intrinsically righteous project can be subverted into a kind of ritual national cleansing that leaves the essential nature of the current regime not only intact, but rejuvenated and exuberant -- "born again," this time as the planet's unassailably "exceptional" nation. Blacks and their progressive allies will be thanked for (once again) cleaning up Uncle Sam's racist, imperial act.

Such is precisely the goal of U.S. corporate rulers and military chieftains, who were quick to disassociate themselves from Donald Trump's defense of the old stone symbols of white power. Global hegemony requires a different symbolic repertoire.

The national Democratic Party -- to which almost all of the personalities depicted in the besieged statues belonged, and which was the White Man's Party for most of the nation's history before switching places with the GOP two generations ago -- is most anxious for a symbolic national makeover. Firmly controlled by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the party offers nothing of substance to its Black and brown constituencies; symbolism is its electoral stock in trade.

National "unity" has always been the watchword of the bipartisan War Party: unity behind the mission of global domination. The U.S. armed forces led in the process of racial integration, the better to subdue the non-white populations of the world. Corporate capital takes on whatever ethnic and racial camouflage is necessary to envelop the planet in its tentacles. Stonewall Jackson is no asset to the imperialist Project for a New American Century. Neither is Robert E. Lee a good fit for corporate governance treaties like NAFTA and TPP.

The Black political (misleadership) class, having no agenda beyond maintaining its own presence and self-dealing opportunities on the peripheries of power, traffics entirely in symbols. They are eager to enlist in every national "unity" project sponsored by corporate interests, to highlight their purported "strategic" presence within power structures. In their world, Black faces in high places is an end in itself; politics is the manipulation of symbols, which are substitutes for power.

In their appeals to corporate power, Black misleaders invoke national "unity" as a euphemism for color-blindness. Rather than cultivate Black communal power, they ask for a place for themselves "at the table" of the rulers -- no agenda required.

For example, in the fall of 2010, the NAACP led a "One Nation Working Together" rally at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington. Nearly 200,000 people showed up, but even Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called it "a march without a plan of action." Speakers endorsed the Democratic Party's general campaign positions. Only Harry Belafonte made any mention of the multiplying wars Barack Obama was waging. His remarks were considered bad form in the context of national "unity."

For the next six years, the NAACP and other established Black civic groups claimed to be grappling with formulating a broad Black political agenda. They failed to produce even a semblance of an agenda, because that would entail making demands on the Democrats in power, including the Black president. Instead, these misleaders acted as annexes of the Democratic Party and called for national unity in the face of Republican racism -- their default, useless position.

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton's defeat, last November, Black Democrats quickly joined in the manufactured anti-Russian hysteria. This can be understood both as a visceral willingness to believe anything negative about the loathsome Orange Menace in the White House, and as an appeal for national unity against the racist hordes in Trump's base, who were somehow allied with the Kremlin. The result, however, was to place Black politicians, including Barbara Lee and John Conyers, in an alliance with the War Party. Regarding Trump, Lee wondered "Where do his loyalties lie?"

Almost the entirety of the U.S. ruling class is eager to treat the racist statues battle as a question of national unity -- although they will draw the line, as has Trump, at George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other Great White Men that did not wear the Confederate States uniform. It is, of course, vital, in mass political education terms, to point out the monstrous social crimes and contradictions embodied in the monuments. It is also important to win victories that people can see with their own eyes, as the statues tumble or disappear in the night. But, if the historical crime is not linked to demands for the righting of present-day wrongs, there will be no lasting benefit to the people's struggle. Rather, the movement will have removed a blemish from the face that the U.S. presents to the world, without effectively challenging current structures of oppression. That's a win-win for the bipartisan War Party, the Democrats and international capital, and is the perfect kind of symbolic victory treasured by the Black political class, but will produce meager and diminishing returns for Black empowerment.

Frederick Douglass's dictum applies generally: "Power concedes nothing without a demand -- it never has and it never will." Protests that focus on the racist personalities and structures of the past must demand remedies for oppressions of the present.

In Baltimore, where the mayor pre-empted protesters by dismantling and hiding racist monuments in the dead of night, activists have erected a tent city to demand housing and jobs, and a $2 billion equity fund to finance ongoing reforms. "Taking down those monuments is good, that was right, but meanwhile it doesn't help anybody get food and shelter," said Rashid Abdul-Aziz, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The group Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle tweeted, "Take down racist statutes along with racist statues."

On 9/11, as the World Trade Center collapsed and the Pentagon was in flames, Jo Moore, an adviser to one of British prime minister Tony Blair's Cabinet members, sent a short email to her boss' press office: "It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors expenses?"

This stunningly crass and cynical move - she was suggesting the use of a global tragedy to divert media attention from a minor story about pensions for local officials - ultimately forced Moore's resignation.

But it comes from a long tradition of politicians and public officials trying to hide news behind other events or releasing it at inconvenient times when you hope few people will notice.

(In the days before he became president, John F. Kennedy, aware that many would object to the naming of his brother as attorney general, joked, "I think I'll open the door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2 a.m., look up and down the street, and if there's no one there, I'll whisper, 'It's Bobby.'")

Friday nights at the start of the weekend have become Washington's golden hour for dumping bad news. Donald Trump's White House already was using this timeless trick barely days after the Bible on which he was sworn in had a chance to cool off.

You'll recall that he tried to rush his immigration ban executive order over the goal line on Friday, Jan. 27, hoping the crowd and the refs would have their collective backs turned away from the line of scrimmage. No such luck - on Saturday night, angry demonstrators thronged the airports and a federal judge quickly blocked Trump's decree.

Even though the constant bombardment of the 24/7 news cycle may have diminished its effectiveness, the ploy has been hauled out several times since, including the Friday night they released the financial disclosure forms of some 180 presidential staffers, which revealed that in combination they were worth billions. So much for The People's President.

But the latest news dump was the most brazen, a triple whammy, for not only did it fall on a Friday night, it happened in the face of a Category 4 hurricane that was just about to hit the Texas coast with a still-to-be-determined, massive loss of property and life. And we got not just one but two stories released as the storm's destruction loomed - the signing of a ban on the transgendered serving in the military and the pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the scourge of Arizona law enforcement.

(There also was the resignation of failed Bond-villain-wannabe Sebastian Gorka, but he released the news, not the president. Then the White House said he was fired. Hilarity ensued.)

In any case, full points for callous opportunism, Mr. Trump.

Arpaio, whose conviction for contempt of court is the least of his multitude of sins (which include racial profiling, prisoner abuse, bogus prosecutions, failure to investigate sex crimes, misuse of funds, promoting "birtherism" and believe it or not, a fake assassination plot), had not even been sentenced yet. But Trump loves his buddy "Sheriff Joe" and will do anything, even trample the rule of law, to help a pal and slake the bloodthirst of the Trump base.

In the face of criticism, on Monday afternoon, at a White House press session with Finland's President Sauli Niinisto, Trump once again pulled his patented, childlike "I meant to do that" routine and declared that he made the Arpaio pardon while the public was focused on Hurricane Harvey not to hide it but because, "Actually, in the middle of the hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally."

Ratings? No matter what he says about why he did what he did, in the face of a major natural disaster and lost lives, it's a statement of monumental, breathtaking insensitivity.

Trump then proceeded to rattle off from a prepared page a list of pardons made by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that he deemed more reprehensible, justifying his own bad pardon by citing the arguably bad pardons of predecessors, and Democrats at that. Historian and former GOP presidential adviser Bruce Bartlett described it as "The Trump doctrine - if any other president has done something wrong, he is permitted to do it too." Yet somehow Trump failed to mention the pardons granted by Republicans Reagan, Bushes 41 and 43 and, most notoriously, Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon.

What's awful is that Trump actually may have pulled it off - this storm is so overwhelming and terrifying that it's hard to think of anything else and maybe his moves against the transgendered and in support of Arpaio will fade into that brand-new Oval Office wallpaper.

The storm also may succeed in taking the bite out of other news Trump may not have been expecting - the latest developments around his suspicious relationship with Russia. The Washington Post, The New York Times and Bloomberg News all have just reported on aspects of a business negotiation that took place while Trump's presidential campaign was in full swing - a proposed deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. (Keep in mind that Trump has often said that he has no holdings or interests in Russia - but apparently not for lack of trying.)

Emails show Felix Sater, Trump's shady Russian-American business associate, boasting to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen about the Trump Tower plan: "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."

As delusional as Sater sounds (among other things, he hoped to be named ambassador to the Bahamas), Trump signed a nonbinding letter of intent for the project and Cohen says he and Trump spoke about the deal on three occasions. Eventually it fell through. "Nevertheless," The Post reports:

[T]he details of the deal, which have not previously been disclosed, provide evidence that Trump's business was actively pursuing significant commercial interests in Russia at the same time he was campaigning to be president - and in a position to determine US-Russia relations.

Meanwhile, on Monday, more than a quarter of the members of the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Advisory Council resigned, citing the president's behavior around the fatal violence in Charlottesville and his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, but also noting, "You have given insufficient attention to the growing threats to the cybersecurity of the critical systems upon which all Americans depend, including those impacting the systems supporting our democratic election process."

The president's attempts to obfuscate and to divert from the truth are why the Mueller and congressional probes of Trump and Russian interference with the 2016 election remain so important (and why an independent nonpartisan commission investigating Russia is still a good idea). Like the old Post Office motto, neither the hurricane's winds nor rains will stay the investigators from their appointed rounds.

There's no doubt that Trump is still scheming how he will stop them. The Arpaio pardon may foreshadow what he intends to do, providing get-out-of-jail-free cards to all involved.