Monday, April 09, 2007

Why are they trying so hard to distract us?

Huffington Post
Larisa Alexandrovna
Why are they trying so hard to distract us?

The national media continues to self destruct under the weight of its politically purchased editorial pages. Not content to simply slink away quietly after leading the nation into a disastrous war of choice through negligent and even highly corrupt reporting practices, the editorial boards of all of the major newspapers - still apparently strapped collectively into a mission accomplished payola flight suit - continue to play political attack dog for their paymasters.
After all, what is a little feigned concern for national security, a little faux patriotism between friends and corporate shills?

On the same day that the Defense Department's Inspector General releases a report showing that high ranking Defense officials lied about Saddam Hussein's non-existent connection to Al Qaeda, the entire press whore was busy contorting itself into Easter treats over a diplomatic trip taken by Speaker Pelosi to Syria. Terms of derision and evocative editorial smears were everywhere, but not aimed at Dick Cheney, who continued to lie with impunity about the IG's report, rather, aimed at Nancy Pelosi for visiting with Syrian officials. Oh, did I mention that Republican members of Congress had just made the same exact trip very recently? Apparently no one told the New York Post that. Nor were the Washington Post or CNN even attempting to get their facts straight before they went on the editorial hit, like mobsters, only with less integrity.

Instead of editorial pages demanding to know why Cheney's friends, handpicked to serve in top positions at the Pentagon, would have lied to their dear chum about something as serious as a war (they likely lied to the President), the major papers were busy making fun of Nancy Pelosi's state - California - as though it were some strange evil appendage without any right to have representation or the ability to produce a savvy diplomat. Let's not forget, that the famous Republican actor who played a fearless Cold War President on TV was from that very same state. The Washington Times, a paper owned by a cult leader who made his fortune off fraud, arms and drug running, and human trafficking and finally declared himself the Messiah to his Christian conservative base, apparently has issues with California. Just how freakish is this thing called beltway journalism going to get?

Pelosi's attire - which was appropriate to the locale - was ridiculed, her gender laughed at, all the while no one bothered to demand an answer to any number of extremely pressing and urgent questions regarding the so called "war on terror" product line. Investor's Business Daily, most recently responsible for pressuring Target to get rid of CDs with a Che Guevara image because it showed support for totalitarianism (although not pressuring Target to stop using Chinese labor), had issues with Pelosi's head scarf.

Why? Where in reality do these people - from the editorial boards, to the talking heads, all of them - think they are, in comparison to the rest of us, that would excuse their behavior as anything but unethical, dishonest, and brutishly cynical?

Perhaps they are in a place where conscience is so easily bought and sold that they can pretend at decency and fool themselves convincingly. But they are not in a place from which the truth will ever venture out, not on purpose anyway. Truth may escape on occasion, and usually in broken parts, seemingly unrelated to a larger narrative, but by and large, this place of so called mainstream journalism is a wasteland, decadent and collapsing under its own Faustian deal.

Do I exaggerate? You tell me.

Thanks to the few remaining MSM journalists who are still able to sneak facts out from the opaque corporate curtain stretched from one end of our democracy to another, we know the following:

The administration ignored repeated warnings preceding attacks on this nation, over and over and over. Yet the editorial pages and TV pundits did not demand that such negligence and complete disregard for the safety of this nation be punished in some manner. No one was willing to speak up and ask even the basic question: is Bush fit to serve? Instead, the President was given unearned mythical standing as some hero because he grabbed a bullhorn at ground zero and said a few well penned words.

Despite the fact that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were directly linked to the attacks of September 11, both countries continued to enjoy privileged status as our "friends."

We have continued providing aid to Pakistan and military support for the Saudi royals, in essence, giving aid and comfort to the enemy as a matter of policy. Six years into this administration we hear nothing about Pakistan's dueling loyalties. Editorial pages across the nation have not devoted their most vitriolic and screeching patriotism to something as serious as giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States, instead such clean sheets have been stained with a steady full front assault on anyone who in anyway disagrees with the official one party rule agenda.

News outlets have taken to calling an American Senator - Barak Obama - after a terrorist, Osama. They have openly slandered such respected statesmen as Senator Kerry and Senator Hagel, and obsessively attacked the first female Speaker of the House.

No one ever bothered to question the last Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, on allegations of bribery by foreign interests in Turkey or why an FBI whistleblower remains gagged in order to cover up those real and serious allegations. No, that never occurred to anyone, it seems, as being anything requiring full page editorials raging with anger the likes of which has been seen over Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria.

No hurling of insults over the revelation that while the Bush-Cheney administration was demanding UN sanctions against North Korea, they were secretly allowing Ethiopia - a third world nation in the middle of a war - to buy arms from North Korea.

No bashing of anyone in the administration over a covert war against Iran that Congress did not authorize, using terrorist organizations as proxies - which again violates this administration's own policy and again gives aid and comfort to the enemy. No one is that patriotic in our editorial rooms and on our editorial boards for such real issues, not when Nancy Pelosi took a trip to Syria which may help in stopping a full blown war against Iran - thereby making the oil executives very unhappy.

Michael Ware, a courageous reporter stationed in Iraq since the start of the war, was recently smeared with lies propagated by a self-loathing, anti-gay rights gay man who makes his living blogging for the RNC from his posh Florida condo.

The entire press went savage wild over Matt Drudge's baseless accusations - that Ware was drunk and heckled Senator John McCain during a press conference - without stopping once to ask two simple questions: Why is Ware the target and where is the footage of this press conference? Not even Ware's own network, CNN, gave him the benefit of the doubt, instead asking him for "his side of the story" when they could have simply aired the footage.

Why are they trying so hard to distract us? Because they have already lied. Lies require more lies and more lies require myths and trumped up scandals. Would honest people ever spend this much time on distractions?

I think that with the exception of a few real journalists and honest columnists in the MSM, the American media-industrial-political complex is a discredited, decadent, ugly thing to behold and, sadly for us, a real danger to democracy. They are a collective Faust, selling their very souls for access, power, money and anything that relates to those three commodities so important to the morally vacuous. They sell their souls, we pay the price, and they make a profit.

If I seem to be exaggerating in my absolute disgust over the state of our media, then you - dear reader - have not been paying attention or you simply don't care.