Category: Media

“TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We’re discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.”

— Bill McKibben

It’s pretty well accepted that to participate on the grand stage in the 21st century (and this was obviously true of the 20th century as well) requires a media strategy and that the major players will, of course, have competing media strategies that seek to further their own goals and impede those of their ideological opponents.

It’s interesting to consider two recent multi-day stories in this light.

First off, just this afternoon, over at Talking Points Memo, I saw what is evidently a new development in the the whole “Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party” imbroglio.

Just to backtrack a little – it’s certainly been interesting to watch the whole Michael Steele/Rush Limbaugh fiasco especially in light of the power that Limbaugh unquestionably holds in the party.  Back at the end of January President Obama reportedly told Republican congressional leaders “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

War, And Results Of, Fast Becoming A Non-Issue!!

US Withdrawing as Media Retreat from Iraq – 03.03.2009

 

I would like to take an opportunity to recommend a piece from a friend of mine, William Cormier who has written today on the role of the mouthpieces in the fascist propaganda machine in the crimes that they so eagerly encourage. Such an essay is especially important to bring awareness to with the $40 million a year ‘populist’ spokesman for the anti-American virulent Republican party form of dead-ender fascism that is the last bastion of scoundrels trying to save their think tank paymasters, the malefactors of great wealth who have subsidized their careers and purchased the media from which they belch their hate and bile. Now with the paymasters of the extremist right in The Homeland doing their damn level best to incite violence, revolution and a crusade against the hated libruls, brown-skinned devils, commies, gays and every other scapegoat that could be invoked at the snakepit of sin and stupidity that was this week’s CPAC bund conference it is imperative that we ask the forbidden question.

How complicit are the establishment hatemongers in the crimes that they have done so much to endorse and in many cases encourage? In my personal opinion, and I have brought this up recently in my own writings – the propagandists and the whores in the media should no longer be able to cower behind the defense of free-speech as a shield as they and the oligarchy that employs their sordid services use the First Amendment as a shield from behind which they can use their money as ‘free speech’ while seeking to destroy the rights of everybody else.

So without further adieu, I present the following with the request that it be taken into account just how complicit that the purveyors of hatred are in the crimes of those that they encourage to commit.

Denial is no excuse, not any longer, not when the stakes are this high. The smell from those smokestacks downwind from Auschwitz wasn’t from freshly baked apple pie.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

-Imperial Grand Prophet Ronald Reagan (mystically foreseeing TARP)

With the passage of the massive economic stimulus plan set to be signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday in Denver the dying squeals of Republican piggies grown fat on the failed policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan are becoming more shrill, psychotic and deafening. The stimulus plan, even as diluted as it is by the inclusion of all of those great tax cuts that have resulted only in proving that trickle down economics is nothing more than Gulliver pissing on the heads of the Lilliputians (translation: the working class) and doing so with sadistic mirth. What the stimulus package represents more than anything even including the ridiculous fucking tax cuts is that the end of an era is nigh and that the machinery of government is being slowly redirected to a previous form where it was not weaponized by overly wealthy pigs, Wall Street looter capitalists and avaricious corporations who only stand for, to borrow from the words of the late, great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:

I: WATCH LISTS, BLACK LISTS, ENEMIES LISTS…..HIT LISTS?

With the long overdue departure of the Bush administration from the White House it is the hope of many that the myriad of transgressions against the Constitution and the people of America will begin to seep out into the public domain: it took a remarkably short time. The day after the helicopter hauled ole George away like so much rubbish a major story broke. In an astonishing shot across the bow directed at the shadow government the first significant whistleblower has already come out with a story (once again ignored by the corporate media) and delivered a devastating blow to the premise that the massive illegal domestic spying programs of the Bush administration were undertaken in order to protect America from terrorism in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.

Over the past few days I have noticed another spike in media talking heads suggesting that the Obama administration will find it tough to roll back the Bush admin torture/interrogation policies. The case they are making is that it is these policies that have kept us safe over the last few years.

I wish that someone would respond by reminding these media types that last year the Washington Post ran an op-ed from a US interrogator in Iraq who made clear that when his team went against the grain and did not use torture they got the intel that led to the discovery of Zarqawi. He also notes that Abu Gharib and Gitmo caused foreign fighters to flood to Iraq and calculates the number of US troop casualties caused by this flocking of foreign fighters.