Tag: Propaganda

As if it weren’t bad enough that Fox Nation populates its web site with right-wing hysteria and links to uber-conservative purveyors of propaganda, they have now demonstrated that their editors are (at least) as stupid as their readers are gullible.

Today I observed a graphic at Fox Nation linking to a column in the Washington “Moonie” Times written by Amanda Carpenter, an O’Reilly Factor frequent fluffer. The article itself was chock full of nuttiness that I’ll get to momentarily. First I need to point out that Fox Nation is so desperate to disparage its enemies that they will project whatever demon suits them into their coverage whether it’s there or not. Here is the graphic showing the groups they say are allegedly mobilizing against town hall protesters:

The National Endowment for the Arts??? Are they really mobilizing against town hall protesters? Were those artists who were crashing community centers and public halls where Tea Baggers were fighting to keep the insurance companies between you and your doctor? Umm…No.

With all that is so terribly wrong in this sordid and rapidly decomposing empire the amount of fixation on the White House ‘Beer Summit’ offers a crystal clear glimpse through the looking glass at WHY we are all fucked. The media fueled racial circus of the story of the rogue cop James Crowley and Professor Henry A. Gates led to yesterday’s sit down with The Pope of Hope and the V.P. from the Usury State over a few beers in a symbolic conference that was given the importance of say The Yalta Conference. In our cheapened, dumbed-down, busted-flat in Baton Rouge and fucked up the ass with no lube by the oligarchy lemming colony it’s media manufactured horseshit like this that gives me zero hope that anything will ever be fixed in my lifetime. With healthcare reform pretty much dead other than the certainty that the insurance corporations will be rolling in the dough from the coming mandated coverage, the wars still raging and the phony recovery setting up millions of suckers for the next fleecing it’s drivel like this that serves as news.

Oh and Michael Jackson is still dead.

Glenn Beck’s unique brand of asylum-spawned demagoguery has drawn comparisons to some notable cranks in history and fiction. Most often he has been likened to either the 1930’s fascist radio priest, Father Coughlin, or to the prototypical, paranoia-crazed tele-pundit, Howard Beale, from the film “Network.”

While both of those models contain poignant resemblances to Beck, neither by themselves comes close enough to capture the full spectrum of his dementia. They don’t even begin to explain his silly costumes and props; his facial tics and nonsense, gurgling noises; his panic-laden admonitions of doom. This is a man who, every day, adds new items to his list of things that cause blood to shoot from his eyes. Were he to be taken literally, he would be severely anemic by now, and his studio would be a quarantined biohazard zone.

However, I think I have just found someone with whom Beck shares a more striking resemblance…

Crossposted at Daily Kos

  It’s official. CNN is FOXlite

    On Friday, the Southern Poverty Law Center called on CNN to fire Dobbs for trading in “racist conspiracy theories.” And some of Dobbs’ staff at CNN have told him and network executives that they are uncomfortable with his persistent focus on the story.

    Klein defended Dobbs, saying that the host’s treatment of the so-called “birther” movement has been “legitimate.”

mediamatters.org

    Does this guy even watch his own network? Or does he just prefer to let Dobbs’s xenophobic McCarthyistic mania masquerade as objective journalism?

For those of you who claim that the media is anything other than owned by the right-wing and the corporatocracy, I give you this:

I found this story at Cryptogon, but it originated at ComputerWorld:

The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted

This demonstrates, yet again, how incestuous is the relationship between the corporate-owned Big Brother government and its Mouthpiece Media:

I was most worried at the time when the LA Times was killing my story, but at the same time the LA Times showed it to the government. Then I really was panicking because that meant that the government knew everything and probably knew my name, but I didn’t have any publicity.

IDGNS: The media merit a full chapter (entitled: ‘Going Public vs. Media Chickens’) in your book. What happened there?

Klein: The LA Times was particularly egregious because they were planning a front-page spread. They were the first entity I’d given all the documents to. Then they talked to the government about it, and it turned out they were talking to not only the NSA director, but the director of national intelligence, who was John Negroponte at the time. So that meant the government knew it. And then a few weeks later the LA Times killed the story. So the only thing you can read into is that basically the government squashed the story. [The LA Times’ editor in early 2006, Dean Baquet, said the government had nothing to do with the decision. ‘We did not have a story, that we could not figure out what was going on,’ he told ABC News — ed.]

IDGNS: How long did they have the story?

Klein: I started dealing with them in late January 2006, and in February they showed it to the government, and then they started wobbling. By the end of March 2006, they officially told me the story was killed.

IDGNS: Did they cover it in April, after it became public?

Klein: No that was funny. After it finally hit the news everywhere else, The LA Times didn’t run with the stuff I’d given them. They’d squashed the whole thing.

We’re supposed to believe this shit?:

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

GASP!  Dick Cheney as trying to kill Al Queda leaders!   Because he was really trying to protect the United States.  He’s just like Jack Bauer!  

No.  I don’t think so.   This is crap, and it’s crap for several reasons:

A.  Anyone who has been paying attention already knew that the U.S. was already doing this years ago.

B.  There are instances of this, revealed to the public, of this already being implemented.  Like, a long time ago.

C.  The people telling us this are ex-CIA.   These sources are automatically suspect.

Here is the story, from Time Magazine in 2002, where this was publicly acknowledged to be occurring:

Yemen Strike Opens New Chapter in War on Terror

The officially unacknowledged CIA missile strike that killed a key al-Qaeda leader on Sunday is a major tactical victory in the U.S. war on terrorism – a war whose rules and terms are quite unlike any America has ever known. Indeed, the assassination by Predator drone of Ali Qaed Sinan al-Harthi in the wilds of northern Yemen encapsulates much about the new war – one of covert actions, sometimes in murky circumstances, designed to disrupt the terrorists’ efforts to regroup far from erstwhile sanctuaries in Afghanistan. And it shows the U.S. is plainly now open to assassination as a means of eliminating terror threats.

So no, this is classic “old news”.  Are people’s memories REALLY that short?

There’s simply no WAY that this is The Big Ugly Scary Secret that Dick Cheney was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes about.  

This is just another propaganda tactic designed to make us think that “you’ve gotta usurp the Constitution and the rule of law to protect Americans, and Dick Cheney was just the guy to do it”.  

Yet everybody’s falling for it, and I mean everybody.  

“I saw it on CNN!  It must be true!   I read it in the NY Times!   It must be true!   And even “I read it on Dailykos!  It must be true.”

No.  It doesn’t even BEGIN to pass the “smell test”.

Please spread this around.   I’m banned at Dailykos, so I can’t post it there, but somebody needs to, because that crap is all over the place there.