Michelle Obama is making the rounds with a curious claim. In a recent interview with CBS This Morning host Gayle King, she contrasted her husband’s presidency with that of his successor by claiming that unlike Trump, the Obama family had had “no scandal”.

Only in the United States of Amnesia could Mrs. Obama get away with a whopper like that.

Ok, maybe her husband didn’t get captured on video talking about the way in which he would grab woman by their private parts but it takes a lot of stones to claim that there were no scandals.

Only in the make believe world that Michelle Obama inhabits was arming and training al Qaeda to overthrow the Syrian government not scandalous.

Following that logic, I’m pretty sure that arming and training Neo-Nazi’s to overthrow the Ukrainian government wasn’t scandalous one little bit. And certainly not overthrowing the Libyan government and turning the country into a living hell where slavery has made a comeback. Don’t even get me started on the overthrow of the left-wing government of Honduras. Please. The US overthrows Central-American countries since forever. And, what of it? It’s not like the migrant caravans heading to the US are from Honduras or anything.

Those were all criminal deeds perpetrated in countries the average American is clueless about. But what about promising hope and change then bailing out Wall Street by foaming the runway with American homeowners? Was that not equally criminally-scandalous?

A lot of my liberal readers protest that I write about Obama and the Democrats when we should focus our ire exclusively on Trump, who is beyond the pale.

My mission is to move past the tribalism that limits our understanding of the economic/political tyranny that confronts us.

Start with the idea that neither party represents you, they just use your outrage over the misdeed of the opposing party to continue the scam. For example, liberals were rightly outraged over the policies of George W. Bush, yet Obama, by the fact that he was perceived as an articulate liberal, was able to mute the outrage that had arisen in the last years of Bush’s term, while continuing the very same policies that harmed his supporters.

I bring this up because in the process of non-stop Russia-gate, liberals managed to embrace a narrative that empowered the worst parts of the foreign policy establishment while inoculating Trump against the very real criminal-scandals that his administration is engaging in right now.

There is a method to the madness.

The narrative managers want us to focus our attention on scandals that are acceptable to the economic and foreign policy establishment. You know–the ones involving sex, drugs, infidelity, or some sort of personal failing on the part of our leaders. In the process we’re missing the really scandalous behavior that our leaders engage in the course of maintaining the American empire. You know–the ones involving murder and torture and plunder.

The only reason these policies don’t seem scandalous is because the narrative managers have normalized them. Going further, without the filter of propaganda promulgated by the corporate media, we’d see the bi-partisan establishment for who they really are.

Monsters.

That’s pretty fucking scandalous.