Former Marine Corps Intel officer, and former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, SCOTT RITTER offers up his analysis of the "FIVE IRAQS" - an excellent commentary to start any discussion on that nation's tortured future. Ritter has been vindicated on his pre-war and post-invasion reporting on almost every issue or fact that he has reported on, in stark contrast to "major media" whores who, like Bill Kristol, have been WRONG on their topics of discussion well over 50% of the time.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071230_the_five_iraqs/
Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
MediaWhores CENSOR the exclusion of Black Protestors from New Orleans City Councit meeting to DEMOLISH 4,500 public housing homes....
In an example of the INSANE CORRUPTION of the Media Whores, the Democrats, and the neo-con war lobby, all siding with Bush-Cheney Republicans in their "POLICE-STATE, , TAX THE POOR, ENRICH the WEALTHY with tax dollars, and ever-expanding WAR-NATION" agenda of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Republican Party, we now have a COMPLETE NEWS CENSORSHIP of:
#1. HOW MUCH FEDEERAL DISASTER RELIEF MONEY - BILLIONS! - have been spent in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005...and,
#2. a complete NEWS BOYCOTT of the use of TEAR GAS, TASERS, and FIRE HOUSES to SUPPRESS non-violent protesters upset at the demolition, with no replacement, of 4,500 units of public housing!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMBWAXfGsc4
The Democrats, the whore Media, and the war lobby ALL AGREE: it is America's destiny to SPEND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS KILLING MUSLIMS, in an effort to retain the primacy of America's current elite.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
New York Whore Times BURIES Sen. Dodd's FILIBUSTER VICTORY fight on page.. A-29. Whore Sulzberger APPROVES the FISA "reform" SPY-on-Americans bill
ARTHUR SULZBERGER's NEW YORK TIMES _BURIES_ the story of Senators Dodd's courageous FILIBUSTER FIGHT PRESERVE all AMERICAN's FREEDOM FROM unlimited GOVERNMENT SPYING to page A-29.
Mr. Sulzberberger and his NEW YORK TIMES are GROUND ZERO for the SCALIA/BUSH/CHENEY COUP that has all but turned American democracy into a police-state plutocracy: from STOLEN VOTES and STOLEN ELECTIONS, to the "MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT" and "Thought Crimes Bill," to the FISA "reform" UNLIMITED, NO OVERSIGHT of GOVERNMENT SPYING ON AMERICANS" bill...
SULZBERGER and his AIPAC NEO-CONS are in FULL ACCORD with the very Gestapo-esque "ENABLING" laws that allowed the Nazi regime in Germany to declare anyone they wanted to be "enemies of the state" (and, need we say it, march those "enemies" off to eternal oblivion).
Thanks to MediaBloodhound for catching the
NAZI NEW YORK SLIMES up to its dirty old GOEBBELS PROPAGANDA TRICKS again:
burying REAL NEWS on page A-29, while putting feel-good, "Aren't the Furher and the Fatherland GREAT?!" stories on the front pages, where busy, stressed out readers are more likely to read them.
MediaBloodhound catches other cases of ARTHUR SULZBERGER as AMERICA's GOEBBELS, including this one of Sulzberger's Whore Times BURYING the "nightmare military courts" story here;
http://mediabloodhound.typepad.com/weblog/nyt_frontback/index.html
JUST LIKE Joseph Goebbels, ARTHUR SULZBERGER is (at least now that Karl Rove is out of the headlines) the HEAD PIMP for the INSANE NEO-CON WAR LUST, the PROPAGANDA NARRATIVE that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney's wars of GROSS INCOMPETENCE and GROSS, in-your-face CORRUPTION are "MAKING AMERICA SAFER" - even as the insane neo-cons, including the NY Times, have ben GUTTING world NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES for two decades. (Ever since, indeed, St. Ronnie Reagan signed such non-proliferation treaties with Michale Gorbachov.)
======================================================
NY Times Buries Dodd's Filibuster Threat Victory
Dec. 18, 2007
http://mediabloodhound.typepad.com/weblog/2007/12/story-of-the--1.html?cid=94112878
It's nothing new for our country's Paper of Record to stick a crucial story in its back pages (often while providing front-page real estate to a particularly banal article).
But one of the most egregious examples of such editorial decisions is today's move by The New York Times to bury news of presidential candidate Senator Christopher Dodd's victorious filibuster threat against the proposed telecom immunity bill.
So what page did The Times slip in this account of Dodd's courageous and historic stand? What page did it cover this patriotic push-back to a bill that, if passed, would effectively reward telecom companies for complicity in the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping of millions of innocent American citizens and set a frightening precedent of similar retroactive immunity in such cases where various parties (CIA, Blackwater mercenaries, etc.) took part in torture, extraordinary renditions or other criminal activities in George Bush's "war on terror"? What page did the paper that sat on the illegal wiretapping story for a year - before "scooping" it - deem this fit to print?
A29. Yes, A29.
(The online version has no page numbers, but this news is buried there as well; no mention of it even makes the home page - where over 90 stories currently reside.)
Now ask yourself how? Who at The Times authorized this inane editorial decision? And what excuse can possibly explain it away?
Senator Dodd's threat to filibuster yesterday and his triumph in having the patently unconstitutional bill withdrawn from a vote last night is precisely the kind of story that should be big news in a democracy, especially one such as ours, which has been gasping under the boot of an overtly criminal White House for seven long years.
What's the sound of one U.S. senator taking a successful stand against a rogue White House administration and its spineless collaborators in Congress?
If you're The Times, it's something akin to a whisper.
Mr. Sulzberberger and his NEW YORK TIMES are GROUND ZERO for the SCALIA/BUSH/CHENEY COUP that has all but turned American democracy into a police-state plutocracy: from STOLEN VOTES and STOLEN ELECTIONS, to the "MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT" and "Thought Crimes Bill," to the FISA "reform" UNLIMITED, NO OVERSIGHT of GOVERNMENT SPYING ON AMERICANS" bill...
SULZBERGER and his AIPAC NEO-CONS are in FULL ACCORD with the very Gestapo-esque "ENABLING" laws that allowed the Nazi regime in Germany to declare anyone they wanted to be "enemies of the state" (and, need we say it, march those "enemies" off to eternal oblivion).
Thanks to MediaBloodhound for catching the
NAZI NEW YORK SLIMES up to its dirty old GOEBBELS PROPAGANDA TRICKS again:
burying REAL NEWS on page A-29, while putting feel-good, "Aren't the Furher and the Fatherland GREAT?!" stories on the front pages, where busy, stressed out readers are more likely to read them.
MediaBloodhound catches other cases of ARTHUR SULZBERGER as AMERICA's GOEBBELS, including this one of Sulzberger's Whore Times BURYING the "nightmare military courts" story here;
http://mediabloodhound.typepad.com/weblog/nyt_frontback/index.html
JUST LIKE Joseph Goebbels, ARTHUR SULZBERGER is (at least now that Karl Rove is out of the headlines) the HEAD PIMP for the INSANE NEO-CON WAR LUST, the PROPAGANDA NARRATIVE that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney's wars of GROSS INCOMPETENCE and GROSS, in-your-face CORRUPTION are "MAKING AMERICA SAFER" - even as the insane neo-cons, including the NY Times, have ben GUTTING world NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES for two decades. (Ever since, indeed, St. Ronnie Reagan signed such non-proliferation treaties with Michale Gorbachov.)
======================================================
NY Times Buries Dodd's Filibuster Threat Victory
Dec. 18, 2007
http://mediabloodhound.typepad.com/weblog/2007/12/story-of-the--1.html?cid=94112878
It's nothing new for our country's Paper of Record to stick a crucial story in its back pages (often while providing front-page real estate to a particularly banal article).
But one of the most egregious examples of such editorial decisions is today's move by The New York Times to bury news of presidential candidate Senator Christopher Dodd's victorious filibuster threat against the proposed telecom immunity bill.
So what page did The Times slip in this account of Dodd's courageous and historic stand? What page did it cover this patriotic push-back to a bill that, if passed, would effectively reward telecom companies for complicity in the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping of millions of innocent American citizens and set a frightening precedent of similar retroactive immunity in such cases where various parties (CIA, Blackwater mercenaries, etc.) took part in torture, extraordinary renditions or other criminal activities in George Bush's "war on terror"? What page did the paper that sat on the illegal wiretapping story for a year - before "scooping" it - deem this fit to print?
A29. Yes, A29.
(The online version has no page numbers, but this news is buried there as well; no mention of it even makes the home page - where over 90 stories currently reside.)
Now ask yourself how? Who at The Times authorized this inane editorial decision? And what excuse can possibly explain it away?
Senator Dodd's threat to filibuster yesterday and his triumph in having the patently unconstitutional bill withdrawn from a vote last night is precisely the kind of story that should be big news in a democracy, especially one such as ours, which has been gasping under the boot of an overtly criminal White House for seven long years.
What's the sound of one U.S. senator taking a successful stand against a rogue White House administration and its spineless collaborators in Congress?
If you're The Times, it's something akin to a whisper.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
COWARDLY, CRAVEN, CORRUPT NY Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald CENSOR Impeachment letter from House Judiciary members...
PROVING ONCE AGAIN that the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST are positively NAZIesque in WHITEWASHING the WAR-CRIMES and "HIGH CRIMES and MISDEMEANORS" of the Bush-Cheney administration re scandals in America, the POST, TIMES, and HERALD CENSOR a letter from three members of the House Judiciary Committee who, upon intensive inspection and introspection, have decided that the conduct of President Bush and Vice President Cheney WARRANT IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS - and no more thus far - in the House Judiciary Committee.
LYING for America's billion-dollar corporations is WHAT THE LYIN' SULZBERGER TIMES, and COWARDLY Fred Hiatt WASHHINGTON POST, do.
===============================================
Efforts to Place Op-Ed on Issue Blocked by Leading Papers
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/11577
Faced with an obstructionist leadership in the House, and a mainstream media that have forsaken their role as a Fourth Estate monitor of government abuse, three Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee are calling on the public to demand that the Congress initiate impeachment hearings immediately against Vice President Dick Cheney.
Speaking at a telephone press conference Friday organized by Democrats.com, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) said that following a bi-partisan vote Nov. 7 by the full House to send Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Cheney impeachment bill (H Res 799, formerly H Res 333) to the Judiciary Committee, it was time for those hearings to "immediately" get underway.
Scoffing at the argument that has been made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others in the Democratic leadership that impeachment might hurt Democratic chances in the November '08 elections, or that it could deter Democrats from their Congressional agenda, Wexler says, "I believe that there is a constitutional obligation for the Congress to hold this administration accountable, and it should not depend on what people think the impact might be on an election. The only question should be: Did Vice President Cheney abuse his powers?"
He adds, "If the American people believe that the democrats are holding a legitimate inquiry into serious issues of constitutional importance, they will not hold it against them. And besides, initial polling would indicate that this is not some off-the-reservation idea."
The Florida legislator, who had not been among the 22 co-sponsors of the impeachment bill submitted last April 24 by Rep. Kucinich, says that by beginning impeachment hearings in the House, "We would create our own fate, and we shouldn't be afraid of that fate."
Noting that the Democratic congressional leadership has been opposing impeachment by saying that they were sent to Washington "to act on issues like insuring children and ending the war," Wexler says, "We have followed that strategy for a year now, and what we have been met with is a president who will not sign any of these measures and a Senate mired in filibusters. We have nothing to lose by starting impeachment."
A major problem in challenging the Democratic leadership, however, has arisen in the form of a national media that simply ignores the growing national impeachment movement and the growing calls for impeachment within the Congress. Wexler reports that an opinion article (available at www.wexlerwantshearings.com) penned by himself and two Judiciary Committee colleagues, Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), which was sent to a number of leading newspapers, including the Miami Herald, the Washington Post and the New York Times, was rejected for publication--an astonishing act of censorship for a document authored by three members of congress on an issue of such significance as impeachment of the vice president.
In that article, Wexler, Gutierrez and Baldwin write:
The issues at hand are too serious to ignore, including credible allegations of abuse of power that if proven may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under our constitution. The charges against Vice President Cheney relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation of the identity of a covert agent for political retaliation, and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens.
Now that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has indicated that the Vice President and his staff purposefully gave him false information about the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert agent to report to the American people, it is even more important for Congress to investigate what may have been an intentional obstruction of justice. Congress should call Mr. McClellan to testify about what he described as being asked to "unknowingly [pass] along false information." In addition, recent revelations have shown that the Administration including Vice President Cheney may have again manipulated and exaggerated evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- this time about Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Asked why he thought leading publications had refused to publish the op-ed piece calling for an immediate start to impeachment hearings, Wexler says, "I think the mainstream media, at least thus far, have bought the notion that impeachment hearings are outside the bounds of what Congress ought to be doing."
He adds that there may be a fear, on the part of corporate media executives and editors, and on the part of Democratic Party congressional leaders, of having been "complicit" in many of the administration's constitutional crimes. "There may be some significant conflicts of interest," he says, that could make them feel uncomfortable about the idea of impeachment hearings.
To push back against this unseemly resistance Rep. Wexler and his two House colleagues have decided to go public with their message. Wexler has set up a website, called WexlerWantsHearings.com. He is urging Americans from across the country to go to the sign and sign on to his call for an immediate start to hearings. "I want to be able to go to my colleagues in the house and say I have 55,000 people calling for hearings," he says.
People should also be contacting their local and national media outlets--and especially the New York Times, Washington Post and Miami Herald--demanding that they report openly and honestly on the growing impeachment movement, and that they publish the Wexler, Gutierrez Baldwin op-ed.
While he does not say where he thinks House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) stands at this point on the subject of starting hearings on the long-stalled Kucinich impeachment bill, which has languished in a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee for over half a year, Rep. Wexler said he has spoken with Conyers about the matter. "I have a lot of confidence in John," he says.
Wexler's, Gutierrez's and Baldwin's new push on impeachment comes just as Kucinich, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has announced that he is preparing to file a major bill of impeachment against President Bush. Kucinich is reportedly working on a sweeping 50-page impeachment bill containing over 20 counts of high crimes and misdemeanors against the president.
Asked about this, and whether it would alter his push for early hearings on Cheney's impeachable crimes, Wexler says no. While pointedly agreeing that the president is likely guilty of the same abuses of power that are being alleged against Cheney, "and probably others in addition," he says it makes sense to focus first on the vice president. "Strategically, I think we are on stronger ground pursuing the vice president."
_______
LYING for America's billion-dollar corporations is WHAT THE LYIN' SULZBERGER TIMES, and COWARDLY Fred Hiatt WASHHINGTON POST, do.
===============================================
Efforts to Place Op-Ed on Issue Blocked by Leading Papers
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/11577
Faced with an obstructionist leadership in the House, and a mainstream media that have forsaken their role as a Fourth Estate monitor of government abuse, three Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee are calling on the public to demand that the Congress initiate impeachment hearings immediately against Vice President Dick Cheney.
Speaking at a telephone press conference Friday organized by Democrats.com, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) said that following a bi-partisan vote Nov. 7 by the full House to send Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Cheney impeachment bill (H Res 799, formerly H Res 333) to the Judiciary Committee, it was time for those hearings to "immediately" get underway.
Scoffing at the argument that has been made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others in the Democratic leadership that impeachment might hurt Democratic chances in the November '08 elections, or that it could deter Democrats from their Congressional agenda, Wexler says, "I believe that there is a constitutional obligation for the Congress to hold this administration accountable, and it should not depend on what people think the impact might be on an election. The only question should be: Did Vice President Cheney abuse his powers?"
He adds, "If the American people believe that the democrats are holding a legitimate inquiry into serious issues of constitutional importance, they will not hold it against them. And besides, initial polling would indicate that this is not some off-the-reservation idea."
The Florida legislator, who had not been among the 22 co-sponsors of the impeachment bill submitted last April 24 by Rep. Kucinich, says that by beginning impeachment hearings in the House, "We would create our own fate, and we shouldn't be afraid of that fate."
Noting that the Democratic congressional leadership has been opposing impeachment by saying that they were sent to Washington "to act on issues like insuring children and ending the war," Wexler says, "We have followed that strategy for a year now, and what we have been met with is a president who will not sign any of these measures and a Senate mired in filibusters. We have nothing to lose by starting impeachment."
A major problem in challenging the Democratic leadership, however, has arisen in the form of a national media that simply ignores the growing national impeachment movement and the growing calls for impeachment within the Congress. Wexler reports that an opinion article (available at www.wexlerwantshearings.com) penned by himself and two Judiciary Committee colleagues, Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), which was sent to a number of leading newspapers, including the Miami Herald, the Washington Post and the New York Times, was rejected for publication--an astonishing act of censorship for a document authored by three members of congress on an issue of such significance as impeachment of the vice president.
In that article, Wexler, Gutierrez and Baldwin write:
The issues at hand are too serious to ignore, including credible allegations of abuse of power that if proven may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under our constitution. The charges against Vice President Cheney relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation of the identity of a covert agent for political retaliation, and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens.
Now that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has indicated that the Vice President and his staff purposefully gave him false information about the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert agent to report to the American people, it is even more important for Congress to investigate what may have been an intentional obstruction of justice. Congress should call Mr. McClellan to testify about what he described as being asked to "unknowingly [pass] along false information." In addition, recent revelations have shown that the Administration including Vice President Cheney may have again manipulated and exaggerated evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- this time about Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Asked why he thought leading publications had refused to publish the op-ed piece calling for an immediate start to impeachment hearings, Wexler says, "I think the mainstream media, at least thus far, have bought the notion that impeachment hearings are outside the bounds of what Congress ought to be doing."
He adds that there may be a fear, on the part of corporate media executives and editors, and on the part of Democratic Party congressional leaders, of having been "complicit" in many of the administration's constitutional crimes. "There may be some significant conflicts of interest," he says, that could make them feel uncomfortable about the idea of impeachment hearings.
To push back against this unseemly resistance Rep. Wexler and his two House colleagues have decided to go public with their message. Wexler has set up a website, called WexlerWantsHearings.com. He is urging Americans from across the country to go to the sign and sign on to his call for an immediate start to hearings. "I want to be able to go to my colleagues in the house and say I have 55,000 people calling for hearings," he says.
People should also be contacting their local and national media outlets--and especially the New York Times, Washington Post and Miami Herald--demanding that they report openly and honestly on the growing impeachment movement, and that they publish the Wexler, Gutierrez Baldwin op-ed.
While he does not say where he thinks House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) stands at this point on the subject of starting hearings on the long-stalled Kucinich impeachment bill, which has languished in a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee for over half a year, Rep. Wexler said he has spoken with Conyers about the matter. "I have a lot of confidence in John," he says.
Wexler's, Gutierrez's and Baldwin's new push on impeachment comes just as Kucinich, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has announced that he is preparing to file a major bill of impeachment against President Bush. Kucinich is reportedly working on a sweeping 50-page impeachment bill containing over 20 counts of high crimes and misdemeanors against the president.
Asked about this, and whether it would alter his push for early hearings on Cheney's impeachable crimes, Wexler says no. While pointedly agreeing that the president is likely guilty of the same abuses of power that are being alleged against Cheney, "and probably others in addition," he says it makes sense to focus first on the vice president. "Strategically, I think we are on stronger ground pursuing the vice president."
_______
Saturday, December 15, 2007
NY Post writer "CHURNED OUT ARTICLES of NEAR HALLUCINATORY INACCURACY" to spring Rapist who would go on to murder other women....
The Great GENE LYONS pops up just in time to RESCUE REALITY ITSELF from the grim, dark clutches of America's stupid, cowering, craven, greedy, amoral, chronically lying, sadistic, ghoulish, craven (did we mention 'craven'?) media whores. As we know, the media whores judge their talents - and are rewarded by their corporate masters (and a dazed and ignorant American public) with SUCCESS, in DIRECT, INVERSE PROPORTION to their factual reporting skills.
Tell American readers that the Bush-Cheney "WAR ON TERROR" is making Amreica LESS SAFE, or that the INSANE Bush BUDGET DEFICITS in support of tax-cuts for the wealthy, and positively GROTESQUE levels of corruption and crony spending that mark the "war on terror" are DESTROYING the American standard of living, then you will be run out of the "major media" on a rail, mocked and sneered at if not smeared, as Robert Scheer was fired from the LA Times after 30 years for relentlessly hammering away at the Bush-Cheney lies-to-war, to be replaced by a rabid WingNut Bush wars apologist Jonah Goldberg. (Or as Dan Rather was run out of CBS, for daring to point out that during the Vietnam War then Texas National Guard Lt. George W. Bush had gone Absent Without Leave, AWOL, and had refused a direct order to take a flight physical exam, after having been trained to be a jet pilot with over a million dollars worth of expensive war-time training.)
But before George W. Bush could go on his month-long vacation of August 2001 while Al Qaida terrorist plotted, unmolested by the entire US multi-trillion dollar defense/intel/counter-terror (CIA/FBI/national-security) establishment to attack America.... before Dick Cheney could hand taxpayer-funded billion dollar, no-bid, no-oversight contracts to his "former" company Halliburton like parents handing out candy on Halloween night; before Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz could dream up America's Stalinesque torture gulag and unleash American bombs all over Afghanistan and Iraq, there was first the little problem of getting such a psychopathic, pathological Republican president elected in the first place.
And that is where the EIGHT YEARS of CLINTON HATING MEDIA comes in. Gene Lyons and his reporting partner, Joe Conason, LITERALLY WROTE THE BOOK, COMPILING THE LIES of the "MAJOR MEDIA," which all through the 1990s became little more than a wing of the CLINTON-HATING RIGHT, in their book, "The Hunting of the President."
The NEW YORK TIMES and the WASHINGTON POST were the WORST OFFENDERS - the Times, itself, "CHURNING OUT ARTICLES OF NEAR HALLUCINATORY INACCURACY" on a weekly, if not daily basis. The Times reporting was so bad that they had to pay a LIBEL penalty to Los Alamos physicist WEN HO LEE after it was revealed that the Times' breathless "TREASON IN THE RANKS!" reporting about alleged nuclear spying by Lee was little more than Nazi-esque Smear Mongering. The Times' break with reality, and sad, sordid "reporting," reached a sorry nadir with the "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL" a "SCANDAL" concocted by KARL ROVE, DICK CHENEY, and GEORGE BUSH to RUN VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE OUT OF TOWN, on a rail, tarred and feathered in January of 2001, after Gore had won the popular vote in the presidential election of November 2000.
By SMEARING Clinton-Gore staffers as "TRASHING THE WHITE HOUSE," Rove and the Republicans LEGITIMIZED their THEFT OF THE ELECTION. And the NEW YORK SLIMES, and WASHINGTON LYING POST, were there every day of the "White House Trashing Scandal," publishing BREATHLESS "reports" and felling entire forests of trees to wax and comment on the alleged "lack of moral values" of the Clinton-Gore staffers.
Only thing... the entire story, the reporting, the smear-mob opinions masking as commentary... simply WERE NOT TRUE. THERE HAD BEEN NO "trashing" of the White House.
KARL ROVE has simply taken the ROUTINE WEAR AND TEAR on offices after an 8 year lease was up - worn carpets, out of date phones and a jungle of computer lines, fading paint and worn furniture - and TURNED IT INTO a MAJOR, NATIONWIDE SCANDAL - with the abject, craven, incompetent, lying cooperation of Arthur Sulzberger's NEW YORK SLIMES, and Fred Hiatt's cowardly "PRAVDA ON THE POTOMAC" Washington Post.
Lyons (and Conason's) book "The HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT" came out before the whore Times and whore Post turned the so-called "White House Trashing Scandal" into a Karl Rove wet-dream that legitimized stolen-election 2000, and chased popular vote winner Al Gore out of Washington in disgrace. Senator JOE LEIBERMAN would show his cowardly colors by REFUSING TO SPEAK UP for the SMEARED Clinton-Gore staffers, because Mr. Lieberman realized even in early 2001 that his goals - permanent US wars in the Mideast at the behest of hard-line Israel Likudniks - were more in line with Dick Cheney's PNAC "go to war in IRAQ!" policy aims, than they ever would be with Al Gore's policy priorities.
(Dick Cheney signs the Project for a New American Century, PNAC, manifesto, advocating war and invasion of Iraq, June 1997. By January 1998, PNAC had codefied its "statement of principles" to specifically indicate that invading Iraq with US military power was the raison-d'etre, the Alpha-and-Omega, for PNAC.
http://newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
And, we apologize: just trying to TOUCH the SURFACE of America's media whoredom over the past decade plus involves a long, relentlessly sourced rant. (Speaking of "sourcing" "The Hunting of the President" has over TWENTY FIVE PAGES of mostly single-line sources and footnotes!)
But this week, Gene Lyons outdoes himself, and magnificently illustrates the sheer, literally MURDEROUS HYPOCRISY of the radical-right CLINTON-HATING "moral values" MEDIA; who for eight long years shouted "CLINTON IS A RAPIST!" and "CLINTON IS A MURDERER!", and in their INSANE LUST to prove exactly that.... THEY advocated the release from prison of a known RAPIST who WOULD, INDEED, go on to MURDER two other women!!
For a taste of Lyons' "the mainstream media got it all wrong about Whitewater" see his index page at SALON.com here:
http://dir.salon.com/topics/gene_lyons/
or, specifically, this little gem that illustrates exactly how Clinton-hating Republican lawyers scuttled a deal in the 'sexual harassment' case between Paula Jones and President Clinton, thereby giving Ken Starr the opportunity to depose President Clinton about an affair that had nothing to do with Starr's $70-million taxpayer financed "Whitewater" financial investigation.
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2000/03/04/willey/
=========================================
There’s more to character than being charming
Gene Lyons
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/210393/
Pundits and TV anchorcreatures love pronouncing about politicians ’ “character,” when all they’re really talking about is personality. Hence glib, superficially charming candidates invariably win plaudits in the reality-TV epics we call presidential elections. This year’s GOP Prince Charming is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. When it comes to ingratiating himself, few surpass the one-time Baptist preacher. He’s witty, he’s warm, and doggone it, people like him. Character consists of something deeper. That’s why it’s important to know the truth about Wayne DuMond, the serial rapist and murderer Huckabee freed from the Arkansas penitentiary to kill again. Unfortunately, that’s the last thing you’ll hear from the candidate himself.
DuMond was a cunning con-man, a predatory psychopath adept at playing victim. A naïve and inexperienced Huckabee went for it, hook, line and sinker. So did others for whom professional skepticism is supposed to be a job requirement. In springing DuMond, the Arkansas Republican courted praise from the Clintonhating right-wing press, whose responsibility for the murder the ex-con committed after his release shouldn’t be overlooked.
Here’s the backstory: in 1985, DuMond, a handyman with a long rap sheet, kidnapped 17-year-old Forrest City, Ar., cheerleader Ashley Stevens and raped her at knifepoint. DuMond’s trademark MO was cutting off his victims’ brassieres with a hunting knife, vowing to murder them if they told.
Stevens not only reported the crime, she later recognized the newly cleanshaven perp on the street, and agreed to testify.
While free on bond, DuMond was found castrated on the floor of their remote mobile home by his children, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels nearby and his own bloody footprints everywhere. DuMond’s blood alcohol level was 2. 8, falling-down drunk. His wife asked police if he’d mutilated himself. Investigators suspected he had. It’s an uncommon, but not unknown, sympathy ploy. No evidence of the masked intruders DuMond claimed gelded him ever emerged.
Two things made the case notorious. In a touch of Arkansas gothic, the St. Francis County Sheriff (who’d played no role in the rape investigation ) exhibited DuMond’s testicles in a jar. Second, although her identity wasn’t initially disclosed, young Stevens was a distant cousin of then-Gov. Bill Clinton.
After Clinton became president, Du-Mond portrayed himself as an innocent victim of the satanic “Clinton machine.” Soft-headed conspiracy theorists who circulated “Clinton death lists” found the notion irresistible.
New York Post columnist and “Current Affairs” correspondent Steve Dunleavy churned out articles of near-hallucinatory inaccuracy championing DuMond’s cause. He portrayed DuMond as a blameless Vietnam vet with no criminal history. In fact, DuMond avoided prison in Oklahoma by testifying against men tried and convicted of beating a man to death with a claw hammer. He’d been convicted of second degree assault in Oregon, and charged with but not tried for a previous rape in Arkansas.
Dunleavy claimed DNA evidence exonerated DuMond, but that a vengeful Clinton prevented his release. Both were categorically false. No DNA evidence existed; Clinton had recused.
DuMond became a right-wing cause célèbre. One Guy Reel wrote a book entitled “Unequal Justice,” parroting the same bogus claims. Most significantly, Jay Cole, a Fayetteville, Ar., Baptist pastor and pal of Huckabee’s, bought into the delusion.
No sooner had Huckabee become governor after Kenneth Starr’s conviction of his Democratic predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, than Huckabee began talking about commuting the presumptively innocent DuMond’s sentence. He clearly expected to be congratulated. Instead, Prosecutor Fletcher Long erupted. How could the governor even think of doing that without reading the trial transcript ?
Abandoning her anonymity, Ashley Stevens invaded Huckabee’s personal space: “This is how close I was to Wayne DuMond,” she said. “I will never forget his face. And now I don’t want you ever to forget my face.” Professed victims wrote agonized letters begging Huckabee to desist.
Today, Huckabee alibis that nobody could have predicted DuMond’s Missouri crimes. Many people did. Even this column warned that: “Rape’s not a crime of passion; it’s a crime of rage. Violent sex offenders, innumerable case studies show, keep at it until something stops them. If Huckabee doesn’t understand that, he’s got no business getting involved.” Instead of backing off, Huckabee got tricky. He held an improper closed-door meeting with the parole board, several of whom say they’d felt pressured. Last week, Huckabee’s then-chief counsel, Olan “Butch” Reeves, basically seconded their claims. After the board voted to parole DuMond to Missouri, Huckabee wrote a “Dear Wayne” letter stressing “my desire... that you be released from prison” —the proverbial smoking gun he can’t now rationalize or whine away. Angry Missouri cops say DuMond’s victim’s severed bra straps were like a calling card. They found his DNA under her fingernails. Huckabee’s latest book claims that DuMond died in prison before coming to trial. In fact, he was convicted of murdering Carol Sue Shields on Nov. 12, 2003, and at the time of his death was a leading suspect in the murder of a second Missouri woman. You’d think Huckabee might have noticed.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Tell American readers that the Bush-Cheney "WAR ON TERROR" is making Amreica LESS SAFE, or that the INSANE Bush BUDGET DEFICITS in support of tax-cuts for the wealthy, and positively GROTESQUE levels of corruption and crony spending that mark the "war on terror" are DESTROYING the American standard of living, then you will be run out of the "major media" on a rail, mocked and sneered at if not smeared, as Robert Scheer was fired from the LA Times after 30 years for relentlessly hammering away at the Bush-Cheney lies-to-war, to be replaced by a rabid WingNut Bush wars apologist Jonah Goldberg. (Or as Dan Rather was run out of CBS, for daring to point out that during the Vietnam War then Texas National Guard Lt. George W. Bush had gone Absent Without Leave, AWOL, and had refused a direct order to take a flight physical exam, after having been trained to be a jet pilot with over a million dollars worth of expensive war-time training.)
But before George W. Bush could go on his month-long vacation of August 2001 while Al Qaida terrorist plotted, unmolested by the entire US multi-trillion dollar defense/intel/counter-terror (CIA/FBI/national-security) establishment to attack America.... before Dick Cheney could hand taxpayer-funded billion dollar, no-bid, no-oversight contracts to his "former" company Halliburton like parents handing out candy on Halloween night; before Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz could dream up America's Stalinesque torture gulag and unleash American bombs all over Afghanistan and Iraq, there was first the little problem of getting such a psychopathic, pathological Republican president elected in the first place.
And that is where the EIGHT YEARS of CLINTON HATING MEDIA comes in. Gene Lyons and his reporting partner, Joe Conason, LITERALLY WROTE THE BOOK, COMPILING THE LIES of the "MAJOR MEDIA," which all through the 1990s became little more than a wing of the CLINTON-HATING RIGHT, in their book, "The Hunting of the President."
The NEW YORK TIMES and the WASHINGTON POST were the WORST OFFENDERS - the Times, itself, "CHURNING OUT ARTICLES OF NEAR HALLUCINATORY INACCURACY" on a weekly, if not daily basis. The Times reporting was so bad that they had to pay a LIBEL penalty to Los Alamos physicist WEN HO LEE after it was revealed that the Times' breathless "TREASON IN THE RANKS!" reporting about alleged nuclear spying by Lee was little more than Nazi-esque Smear Mongering. The Times' break with reality, and sad, sordid "reporting," reached a sorry nadir with the "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL" a "SCANDAL" concocted by KARL ROVE, DICK CHENEY, and GEORGE BUSH to RUN VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE OUT OF TOWN, on a rail, tarred and feathered in January of 2001, after Gore had won the popular vote in the presidential election of November 2000.
By SMEARING Clinton-Gore staffers as "TRASHING THE WHITE HOUSE," Rove and the Republicans LEGITIMIZED their THEFT OF THE ELECTION. And the NEW YORK SLIMES, and WASHINGTON LYING POST, were there every day of the "White House Trashing Scandal," publishing BREATHLESS "reports" and felling entire forests of trees to wax and comment on the alleged "lack of moral values" of the Clinton-Gore staffers.
Only thing... the entire story, the reporting, the smear-mob opinions masking as commentary... simply WERE NOT TRUE. THERE HAD BEEN NO "trashing" of the White House.
KARL ROVE has simply taken the ROUTINE WEAR AND TEAR on offices after an 8 year lease was up - worn carpets, out of date phones and a jungle of computer lines, fading paint and worn furniture - and TURNED IT INTO a MAJOR, NATIONWIDE SCANDAL - with the abject, craven, incompetent, lying cooperation of Arthur Sulzberger's NEW YORK SLIMES, and Fred Hiatt's cowardly "PRAVDA ON THE POTOMAC" Washington Post.
Lyons (and Conason's) book "The HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT" came out before the whore Times and whore Post turned the so-called "White House Trashing Scandal" into a Karl Rove wet-dream that legitimized stolen-election 2000, and chased popular vote winner Al Gore out of Washington in disgrace. Senator JOE LEIBERMAN would show his cowardly colors by REFUSING TO SPEAK UP for the SMEARED Clinton-Gore staffers, because Mr. Lieberman realized even in early 2001 that his goals - permanent US wars in the Mideast at the behest of hard-line Israel Likudniks - were more in line with Dick Cheney's PNAC "go to war in IRAQ!" policy aims, than they ever would be with Al Gore's policy priorities.
(Dick Cheney signs the Project for a New American Century, PNAC, manifesto, advocating war and invasion of Iraq, June 1997. By January 1998, PNAC had codefied its "statement of principles" to specifically indicate that invading Iraq with US military power was the raison-d'etre, the Alpha-and-Omega, for PNAC.
http://newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
And, we apologize: just trying to TOUCH the SURFACE of America's media whoredom over the past decade plus involves a long, relentlessly sourced rant. (Speaking of "sourcing" "The Hunting of the President" has over TWENTY FIVE PAGES of mostly single-line sources and footnotes!)
But this week, Gene Lyons outdoes himself, and magnificently illustrates the sheer, literally MURDEROUS HYPOCRISY of the radical-right CLINTON-HATING "moral values" MEDIA; who for eight long years shouted "CLINTON IS A RAPIST!" and "CLINTON IS A MURDERER!", and in their INSANE LUST to prove exactly that.... THEY advocated the release from prison of a known RAPIST who WOULD, INDEED, go on to MURDER two other women!!
For a taste of Lyons' "the mainstream media got it all wrong about Whitewater" see his index page at SALON.com here:
http://dir.salon.com/topics/gene_lyons/
or, specifically, this little gem that illustrates exactly how Clinton-hating Republican lawyers scuttled a deal in the 'sexual harassment' case between Paula Jones and President Clinton, thereby giving Ken Starr the opportunity to depose President Clinton about an affair that had nothing to do with Starr's $70-million taxpayer financed "Whitewater" financial investigation.
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2000/03/04/willey/
=========================================
There’s more to character than being charming
Gene Lyons
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/210393/
Pundits and TV anchorcreatures love pronouncing about politicians ’ “character,” when all they’re really talking about is personality. Hence glib, superficially charming candidates invariably win plaudits in the reality-TV epics we call presidential elections. This year’s GOP Prince Charming is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. When it comes to ingratiating himself, few surpass the one-time Baptist preacher. He’s witty, he’s warm, and doggone it, people like him. Character consists of something deeper. That’s why it’s important to know the truth about Wayne DuMond, the serial rapist and murderer Huckabee freed from the Arkansas penitentiary to kill again. Unfortunately, that’s the last thing you’ll hear from the candidate himself.
DuMond was a cunning con-man, a predatory psychopath adept at playing victim. A naïve and inexperienced Huckabee went for it, hook, line and sinker. So did others for whom professional skepticism is supposed to be a job requirement. In springing DuMond, the Arkansas Republican courted praise from the Clintonhating right-wing press, whose responsibility for the murder the ex-con committed after his release shouldn’t be overlooked.
Here’s the backstory: in 1985, DuMond, a handyman with a long rap sheet, kidnapped 17-year-old Forrest City, Ar., cheerleader Ashley Stevens and raped her at knifepoint. DuMond’s trademark MO was cutting off his victims’ brassieres with a hunting knife, vowing to murder them if they told.
Stevens not only reported the crime, she later recognized the newly cleanshaven perp on the street, and agreed to testify.
While free on bond, DuMond was found castrated on the floor of their remote mobile home by his children, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels nearby and his own bloody footprints everywhere. DuMond’s blood alcohol level was 2. 8, falling-down drunk. His wife asked police if he’d mutilated himself. Investigators suspected he had. It’s an uncommon, but not unknown, sympathy ploy. No evidence of the masked intruders DuMond claimed gelded him ever emerged.
Two things made the case notorious. In a touch of Arkansas gothic, the St. Francis County Sheriff (who’d played no role in the rape investigation ) exhibited DuMond’s testicles in a jar. Second, although her identity wasn’t initially disclosed, young Stevens was a distant cousin of then-Gov. Bill Clinton.
After Clinton became president, Du-Mond portrayed himself as an innocent victim of the satanic “Clinton machine.” Soft-headed conspiracy theorists who circulated “Clinton death lists” found the notion irresistible.
New York Post columnist and “Current Affairs” correspondent Steve Dunleavy churned out articles of near-hallucinatory inaccuracy championing DuMond’s cause. He portrayed DuMond as a blameless Vietnam vet with no criminal history. In fact, DuMond avoided prison in Oklahoma by testifying against men tried and convicted of beating a man to death with a claw hammer. He’d been convicted of second degree assault in Oregon, and charged with but not tried for a previous rape in Arkansas.
Dunleavy claimed DNA evidence exonerated DuMond, but that a vengeful Clinton prevented his release. Both were categorically false. No DNA evidence existed; Clinton had recused.
DuMond became a right-wing cause célèbre. One Guy Reel wrote a book entitled “Unequal Justice,” parroting the same bogus claims. Most significantly, Jay Cole, a Fayetteville, Ar., Baptist pastor and pal of Huckabee’s, bought into the delusion.
No sooner had Huckabee become governor after Kenneth Starr’s conviction of his Democratic predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, than Huckabee began talking about commuting the presumptively innocent DuMond’s sentence. He clearly expected to be congratulated. Instead, Prosecutor Fletcher Long erupted. How could the governor even think of doing that without reading the trial transcript ?
Abandoning her anonymity, Ashley Stevens invaded Huckabee’s personal space: “This is how close I was to Wayne DuMond,” she said. “I will never forget his face. And now I don’t want you ever to forget my face.” Professed victims wrote agonized letters begging Huckabee to desist.
Today, Huckabee alibis that nobody could have predicted DuMond’s Missouri crimes. Many people did. Even this column warned that: “Rape’s not a crime of passion; it’s a crime of rage. Violent sex offenders, innumerable case studies show, keep at it until something stops them. If Huckabee doesn’t understand that, he’s got no business getting involved.” Instead of backing off, Huckabee got tricky. He held an improper closed-door meeting with the parole board, several of whom say they’d felt pressured. Last week, Huckabee’s then-chief counsel, Olan “Butch” Reeves, basically seconded their claims. After the board voted to parole DuMond to Missouri, Huckabee wrote a “Dear Wayne” letter stressing “my desire... that you be released from prison” —the proverbial smoking gun he can’t now rationalize or whine away. Angry Missouri cops say DuMond’s victim’s severed bra straps were like a calling card. They found his DNA under her fingernails. Huckabee’s latest book claims that DuMond died in prison before coming to trial. In fact, he was convicted of murdering Carol Sue Shields on Nov. 12, 2003, and at the time of his death was a leading suspect in the murder of a second Missouri woman. You’d think Huckabee might have noticed.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Here's how CNN WHORES the "CIA torture tapes Destroyed" story... TORTURE itself barely mentioned!
In a top- and bottom-of-hour radio headline newscast on Wednesday, 12-12-2007, the CNN national radio anchor (Ed Henry?) gave the 'news highlights' about the "CIA DESTROYED VIDEO TAPES OF TORTURE SESSIONS" mini-scandal sweeping Capitol Hill this week. According to Henry, the top 3 questions about the scandal were
#1. "Who ordered the tapes?"
#2. "Who ordered them to be destroyed?" and
#3. "When were they destroyed?"
According to CNN and its 'news' anchors, THE FACT THAT THE UNITED STATES is now in the TORTURE business (which of course can result in victims DYING, which would be MURDER) isn't even news!!
As "liberal" radio host Ed Schultz says, "EVERYONE IN THE WORLD KNOWS THAT THIS IS A FAKE SCANADAL, because the [COWARDLY- our term] DEMOCRATS will NOT do a DAMN THING ABOUT IT." NANCY PELOSI's CONGRESS is in COWARDLY RETREAT on THIS SCANDAL, like every one of 1,000 Bush-Cheney-Rove Republican scandals before it.
And the REASON the Bush administration GETS AWAY WITH SCANDALS - and the Democrats have MASTERED THE ART of POLITICAL COWARDICE - is because the "mainstream media" whores LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING, and have an infinite ability to SPIN A MAJOR SCANDAL as a "he said, she said" tempest in a tea-pot. From FABRICATED INTELLIGENCE, LIES-to-war; TORTURE; SCAPEGOATING American female privates for the administration's world-wide TORTURE program; the vast SURVEILLANCE STATE in America... WHILE OSAMA bin Laden ROAMS FREE in Iraq! - America is now a corrupted nation FOLLOWING Naziesque, Gestapo, "DEFENSE OF THE REICH" propaganda in servile submission to the neo-con (AIPAC) / neo-Confederate alliance to once again make America a vast slave plantation, and to remake the world in that image with the mutual cooperation of Israel, which once was a colony of America, but now America is practically a colony of Israel.
HERE ARE SOME OF THE NAZI-esque PROPAGANDA TERMS the American media - including the AIPAC neo-cons in government and media - use to hide or disguise the real ramifications of the Bush/Cheney/neo-con War-on-Terror:
- "DETAINEES" to describe "PRISONERS" sent to AMERICA's VERSION of STALIN's GULAG...
- "WATER-BOARDING" to describe DROWNING of bound and tied prisoners. A board placed on a fulcrum like a see-saw, with a prisoner strapped to the board at one end with his head sticking past the board, makes the dunking of the prisoner's head into a tub of water easy, almost effortless, for those Americans and their hired foreign mercenaries administering the torture. Such a rig can be dispensed with simply by tying the prisoners head behind his back, and forcing his head into a bathtub full of water, or even more simply, by binding the prisoner to a board, tying a rag over his mouth and nose, and pouring water on the rag, so the prisoner can no longer breathe. The American WHORE media prefers the term "WATERBOARDING" because it sounds so innocuous for "ATTEMPTED DROWNING" of hapless prisoners.
- "COLLATERAL DAMAGE" to describe what America's bombs and shells have done to towns and cities in the Mideast, what Hitler's bombers did to Guernica, Rotterdam, London, Coventary, Warsaw, and other cities throughout Europe and Russia during WWII.
- "WIRETAPPING" to describe a full STAZI-esque SPYING on any and all Americans the White House wants surveillance on - without ANY OVERSIGHT or judicial restraint.
- HR-1959 "Radicalization and Home Grown Terrorism bill" to describe the big DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS RUBBER STAMP on the official END OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (following the previous GESTAPO-esque unP.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, and the even more draconian, GESTAPO-esque MCA, "MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT.")
ALL THE ABOVE have the FULL APPROVAL of America's Goebbels-esque "Major Media" - and especially have the approval of the AIAPC neo-con war-hawks who, surprise, are STILL COMPLAINING about the Gestapo using those same techniques during WWII.
#1. "Who ordered the tapes?"
#2. "Who ordered them to be destroyed?" and
#3. "When were they destroyed?"
According to CNN and its 'news' anchors, THE FACT THAT THE UNITED STATES is now in the TORTURE business (which of course can result in victims DYING, which would be MURDER) isn't even news!!
As "liberal" radio host Ed Schultz says, "EVERYONE IN THE WORLD KNOWS THAT THIS IS A FAKE SCANADAL, because the [COWARDLY- our term] DEMOCRATS will NOT do a DAMN THING ABOUT IT." NANCY PELOSI's CONGRESS is in COWARDLY RETREAT on THIS SCANDAL, like every one of 1,000 Bush-Cheney-Rove Republican scandals before it.
And the REASON the Bush administration GETS AWAY WITH SCANDALS - and the Democrats have MASTERED THE ART of POLITICAL COWARDICE - is because the "mainstream media" whores LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING, and have an infinite ability to SPIN A MAJOR SCANDAL as a "he said, she said" tempest in a tea-pot. From FABRICATED INTELLIGENCE, LIES-to-war; TORTURE; SCAPEGOATING American female privates for the administration's world-wide TORTURE program; the vast SURVEILLANCE STATE in America... WHILE OSAMA bin Laden ROAMS FREE in Iraq! - America is now a corrupted nation FOLLOWING Naziesque, Gestapo, "DEFENSE OF THE REICH" propaganda in servile submission to the neo-con (AIPAC) / neo-Confederate alliance to once again make America a vast slave plantation, and to remake the world in that image with the mutual cooperation of Israel, which once was a colony of America, but now America is practically a colony of Israel.
HERE ARE SOME OF THE NAZI-esque PROPAGANDA TERMS the American media - including the AIPAC neo-cons in government and media - use to hide or disguise the real ramifications of the Bush/Cheney/neo-con War-on-Terror:
- "DETAINEES" to describe "PRISONERS" sent to AMERICA's VERSION of STALIN's GULAG...
- "WATER-BOARDING" to describe DROWNING of bound and tied prisoners. A board placed on a fulcrum like a see-saw, with a prisoner strapped to the board at one end with his head sticking past the board, makes the dunking of the prisoner's head into a tub of water easy, almost effortless, for those Americans and their hired foreign mercenaries administering the torture. Such a rig can be dispensed with simply by tying the prisoners head behind his back, and forcing his head into a bathtub full of water, or even more simply, by binding the prisoner to a board, tying a rag over his mouth and nose, and pouring water on the rag, so the prisoner can no longer breathe. The American WHORE media prefers the term "WATERBOARDING" because it sounds so innocuous for "ATTEMPTED DROWNING" of hapless prisoners.
- "COLLATERAL DAMAGE" to describe what America's bombs and shells have done to towns and cities in the Mideast, what Hitler's bombers did to Guernica, Rotterdam, London, Coventary, Warsaw, and other cities throughout Europe and Russia during WWII.
- "WIRETAPPING" to describe a full STAZI-esque SPYING on any and all Americans the White House wants surveillance on - without ANY OVERSIGHT or judicial restraint.
- HR-1959 "Radicalization and Home Grown Terrorism bill" to describe the big DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS RUBBER STAMP on the official END OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (following the previous GESTAPO-esque unP.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, and the even more draconian, GESTAPO-esque MCA, "MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT.")
ALL THE ABOVE have the FULL APPROVAL of America's Goebbels-esque "Major Media" - and especially have the approval of the AIAPC neo-con war-hawks who, surprise, are STILL COMPLAINING about the Gestapo using those same techniques during WWII.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
"An Intelligence BOMBSHELL about IRAN and NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" is how CNN _WHORES_ the December NIE intel , "NO Iran bomb program" report...
Stealing a page from George Orwell's totalitarian novels, and from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' reality-distorting hate propaganda leading up to the Germany's WWII invasions of first Western Europe and then Eastern Europe, CNN is trumpeting their headline:
....which of course to millions of sofa-bound TV viewers out there in America-land, is interpreted as
CNN's headline further implies that while the US intel pushed by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secreatary of State Colin Powell, and the entire Bush-Cheney neo-con "intel" choir "IRAG HAS WMD PROGRAM!" was WRONG in the Bush administration's Naziesque rush to bomb and invade Iraq, this time, with the NIE reporting that Iran DOES NOT have a nuclear bomb program, CNN's screaming headline implies "the INTEL (NIE report that Iran STOPPED its nuclear program in 2004) MAY NOT BE correct."
In fact, the latest NIE report is a BOMBSHELL, prcisely because it demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that America's election-stealing president and vice president are WAR MONGERING LIARS INSANE with WAR LUST to BOMB YET ANOTHER COUNTRY.
CNN, in uber media-whore, WAR-PROPAGANDA MODE, manages to convey a message DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSIE to the real facts of this news story... and furthermore, in doing so, CNN WHITEWASHES the IN-YOUR-FACE WAR LIES of Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their entire AIPAC neo-con-infested government and media.
As if that isn't enough, in trumpeting their "BOMBSHELL INTELLIGENCE REPORT about IRAN's NUCLEAR PROGRAM!" CNN also DISTORTS and MISINFORMS on the true nature of America's neo-con War Mongers, who have been on a 2 decade quest to UNDO the NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES... of PRESIDENT (and Republican saint) RONALD REAGAN, by GUTTIN international NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, in favor of "UNILATERAL" American NUCLEAR MILTIARY BACKED THREATS and COERCIONS!
America's media, case study CNN "news" - has gone COMPLETELY NAZI in its lust for WIDER WARS. And when CNN isn't 'TEASING" with its "IRAN NUCLEAR BOMBSHELL!" hysterical headline (which, as with most TV, the TEASERS gets more air-time over the days ahead of a report than the actual air time spent on that report), CNN is PIMPING its FAVORITE 'news" coverage - THE 2008 presidential CANDIDATE.
Specifically, this hour CNN is pimping CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS of the candidates!
Well, THANKS, CNN, for the TEXTBOOK example of an American media network WHORING a PROPAGANDA NARRATIVE: HYSTERICAL Nazi-esque headlines "WE MUST INVADE AND CONQUER THE ENEMY NOW, before they DESTROY OUR REICH and the Good Ameican volk!" interspersed with American CELEBRITY WORSHIP bullshit.
---------------------------------
CNN headline: "U.S. wants more pressure on Iran
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/12/08/us.iran/index.html
U.S. Defense Secretary Gates calls on international community to pressurize Iran
Makes comments at Gulf states' security conference in Manama, Bahrain
Gates: "Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos"
[NOTE: AMERICA ILLEGALLY BOMBED and OCCUPIED IRAQ, has ALLOWED the TALIBAN to overtake over half of Afghanistan, and now the neo-con US War Secreatary IS BLAMING IRAN for "INSTABILITY and CHAOS" in the area!]
MANAMA, Bahrain (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called on the international community to step up pressure on Iran to vow not to develop nuclear weapons, suspend uranium enrichment and open up its nuclear facilities for inspection.
Gates' address to a Gulf states' security conference Saturday came a day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters at a NATO meeting in Belgium that the United States will continue to push for a new U.N. resolution to pressure Iran to halt its nuclear program.
Gates sarcastically noted that Iran celebrated the U.S. intelligence community's recent report -- the National Intelligence Estimate -- that said Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. He said it marks a "watershed" that "Iran has, for the first time, embraced as valid an assessment of the United States intelligence community -- on Iran's nuclear weapons program."
He said "since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence assessments, I assume that it also will embrace as valid American intelligence assessments" that Iran is funding and training of militia groups in Iraq; deploying lethal weapons and technology to both Iraq and Afghanistan; supporting terrorist organizations -- like Hezbollah and Hamas -- that have murdered thousands of innocent civilians; and continued research and development of medium-range ballistic missiles that can carry weapons of mass destruction.
"In reality, you cannot pick and choose only the conclusions you like of this National Intelligence Estimate," Gates said.
"The report expresses with greater confidence than ever that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program -- developed secretly, kept hidden for years, and in violation of its international obligations," he said.
"It reports that they do continue their nuclear enrichment program, an essential long lead time component of any nuclear weapons program. It states that they do have the mechanisms still in place to restart their program."
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Gates said pressure from the international community is the only thing that can stop Iran from restarting its nuclear weapons program at any time "if it has not done so already."
"While we must keep our options open, the United States and the international community must continue -- and intensify -- our economic, financial, and diplomatic pressures on Iran to suspend enrichment and agree to verifiable arrangements that can prevent that country from resuming its nuclear weapons program at a moment's notice -- at the whim of its most militant leaders," Gates said.
"Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents -- Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike," he said.
"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing."
Gates, in an interview Friday with the Al-Arabiya television network, said: "The U.S. is 100 percent committed to a diplomatic option on Iran," according to a retranslation of his remarks from English to Arabic to English. E-mail to a friend
"AN INTELLIGENCE BOMBSHELL ABOUT IRAN and NUCLEAR WEAPONS... but this time is the intel correct?"
....which of course to millions of sofa-bound TV viewers out there in America-land, is interpreted as
"SEE THERE! CNN says there is a BOMBSHELL INTELLIGENCE REPORT THAT IRAN HAS NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"
CNN's headline further implies that while the US intel pushed by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secreatary of State Colin Powell, and the entire Bush-Cheney neo-con "intel" choir "IRAG HAS WMD PROGRAM!" was WRONG in the Bush administration's Naziesque rush to bomb and invade Iraq, this time, with the NIE reporting that Iran DOES NOT have a nuclear bomb program, CNN's screaming headline implies "the INTEL (NIE report that Iran STOPPED its nuclear program in 2004) MAY NOT BE correct."
In fact, the latest NIE report is a BOMBSHELL, prcisely because it demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that America's election-stealing president and vice president are WAR MONGERING LIARS INSANE with WAR LUST to BOMB YET ANOTHER COUNTRY.
CNN, in uber media-whore, WAR-PROPAGANDA MODE, manages to convey a message DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSIE to the real facts of this news story... and furthermore, in doing so, CNN WHITEWASHES the IN-YOUR-FACE WAR LIES of Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their entire AIPAC neo-con-infested government and media.
As if that isn't enough, in trumpeting their "BOMBSHELL INTELLIGENCE REPORT about IRAN's NUCLEAR PROGRAM!" CNN also DISTORTS and MISINFORMS on the true nature of America's neo-con War Mongers, who have been on a 2 decade quest to UNDO the NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES... of PRESIDENT (and Republican saint) RONALD REAGAN, by GUTTIN international NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, in favor of "UNILATERAL" American NUCLEAR MILTIARY BACKED THREATS and COERCIONS!
America's media, case study CNN "news" - has gone COMPLETELY NAZI in its lust for WIDER WARS. And when CNN isn't 'TEASING" with its "IRAN NUCLEAR BOMBSHELL!" hysterical headline (which, as with most TV, the TEASERS gets more air-time over the days ahead of a report than the actual air time spent on that report), CNN is PIMPING its FAVORITE 'news" coverage - THE 2008 presidential CANDIDATE.
Specifically, this hour CNN is pimping CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS of the candidates!
Well, THANKS, CNN, for the TEXTBOOK example of an American media network WHORING a PROPAGANDA NARRATIVE: HYSTERICAL Nazi-esque headlines "WE MUST INVADE AND CONQUER THE ENEMY NOW, before they DESTROY OUR REICH and the Good Ameican volk!" interspersed with American CELEBRITY WORSHIP bullshit.
---------------------------------
CNN headline: "U.S. wants more pressure on Iran
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/12/08/us.iran/index.html
U.S. Defense Secretary Gates calls on international community to pressurize Iran
Makes comments at Gulf states' security conference in Manama, Bahrain
Gates: "Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos"
[NOTE: AMERICA ILLEGALLY BOMBED and OCCUPIED IRAQ, has ALLOWED the TALIBAN to overtake over half of Afghanistan, and now the neo-con US War Secreatary IS BLAMING IRAN for "INSTABILITY and CHAOS" in the area!]
MANAMA, Bahrain (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called on the international community to step up pressure on Iran to vow not to develop nuclear weapons, suspend uranium enrichment and open up its nuclear facilities for inspection.
Gates' address to a Gulf states' security conference Saturday came a day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters at a NATO meeting in Belgium that the United States will continue to push for a new U.N. resolution to pressure Iran to halt its nuclear program.
Gates sarcastically noted that Iran celebrated the U.S. intelligence community's recent report -- the National Intelligence Estimate -- that said Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. He said it marks a "watershed" that "Iran has, for the first time, embraced as valid an assessment of the United States intelligence community -- on Iran's nuclear weapons program."
He said "since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence assessments, I assume that it also will embrace as valid American intelligence assessments" that Iran is funding and training of militia groups in Iraq; deploying lethal weapons and technology to both Iraq and Afghanistan; supporting terrorist organizations -- like Hezbollah and Hamas -- that have murdered thousands of innocent civilians; and continued research and development of medium-range ballistic missiles that can carry weapons of mass destruction.
"In reality, you cannot pick and choose only the conclusions you like of this National Intelligence Estimate," Gates said.
"The report expresses with greater confidence than ever that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program -- developed secretly, kept hidden for years, and in violation of its international obligations," he said.
"It reports that they do continue their nuclear enrichment program, an essential long lead time component of any nuclear weapons program. It states that they do have the mechanisms still in place to restart their program."
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Gates said pressure from the international community is the only thing that can stop Iran from restarting its nuclear weapons program at any time "if it has not done so already."
"While we must keep our options open, the United States and the international community must continue -- and intensify -- our economic, financial, and diplomatic pressures on Iran to suspend enrichment and agree to verifiable arrangements that can prevent that country from resuming its nuclear weapons program at a moment's notice -- at the whim of its most militant leaders," Gates said.
"Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents -- Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike," he said.
"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing."
Gates, in an interview Friday with the Al-Arabiya television network, said: "The U.S. is 100 percent committed to a diplomatic option on Iran," according to a retranslation of his remarks from English to Arabic to English. E-mail to a friend
Friday, December 07, 2007
uber-Media WHORES CNN sought to crank out "IRAN NUCLEAR BOMB!" bogus "news" special....
POOR WOLF BLITZER!
With Mr. Bush exposed as a war-lusting liar (President Bush has actually been hyping "WORLD WAR THREE" for the past few weeks from behind his "restore honor and dignity to the White House" podium) CNN has had to cancel its Fox 'news'-esque "IRAN SECRET NUCLEAR BOMB!" special TV production.
And Mr. Blitzer, of CNN 'news,' will just have to surreptitiously watch those videos of Air Force bombs levelling Iraqi homes (the ones that CNN and other media whores no longer run on American airwaves... wouldn't be "Christian" to gloat over bombing homes, would it?), instead of watching the Air Force crank out its newest arousal-inciting "BUNKER BUSTERS," "shake and bake" (phosphorous bombs), MOAB "Mother of All Bombs" cargo-plane launched super-bombs (and maybe, even, tactical nukes?) over virgin cities and targets in IRAN war coverage that Mr. Bush, Mr. Blitzer, Mr. Lieberman, Mr. Gergen (uber Washington Post "conventional wisdom" media whore) and so many other ghouls in the American press, media and government have been so lusting for....
But CHEER UP, BOYS! With the AIPAC neo-con war-lobby owning Nancy Pelosi and her craven Democrats, (including Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid too timid to step on a bug), the jig is not yet up on your bombing/death-squads/torture/looting/nuclear fallout/hired mercenaries/police-state America and permanent war fantasies just yet!
=========================================
Intel report sinks CNN Iran special
Two-hour 'Nuclear' was slated for Dec. 12
By BRIAN LOWRYHOLLYWOOD
7 December 2007
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117977083.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1
-- The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary "We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear."
The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the "CNN Presents" banner, was "set partially in the future," featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials -- playing fictional cabinet members -- debate how to deal with the Iranian threat.
That special was "based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions," said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson, noting that the surprising NIE report "changed everything."
In its place, CNN will this weekend air two Campbell Brown-hosted specials on the Iran situation and its history. Portions of "We Were Warned" correspondent Frank Sesno's original reporting will be incorporated into those hours, which air Saturday and Sunday.
Among those participating in the war-game panel featured as part of "Iran Goes Nuclear" were former CIA director Jim Woolsey, former EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman and former presidential adviser David Gergen.
With Mr. Bush exposed as a war-lusting liar (President Bush has actually been hyping "WORLD WAR THREE" for the past few weeks from behind his "restore honor and dignity to the White House" podium) CNN has had to cancel its Fox 'news'-esque "IRAN SECRET NUCLEAR BOMB!" special TV production.
And Mr. Blitzer, of CNN 'news,' will just have to surreptitiously watch those videos of Air Force bombs levelling Iraqi homes (the ones that CNN and other media whores no longer run on American airwaves... wouldn't be "Christian" to gloat over bombing homes, would it?), instead of watching the Air Force crank out its newest arousal-inciting "BUNKER BUSTERS," "shake and bake" (phosphorous bombs), MOAB "Mother of All Bombs" cargo-plane launched super-bombs (and maybe, even, tactical nukes?) over virgin cities and targets in IRAN war coverage that Mr. Bush, Mr. Blitzer, Mr. Lieberman, Mr. Gergen (uber Washington Post "conventional wisdom" media whore) and so many other ghouls in the American press, media and government have been so lusting for....
But CHEER UP, BOYS! With the AIPAC neo-con war-lobby owning Nancy Pelosi and her craven Democrats, (including Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid too timid to step on a bug), the jig is not yet up on your bombing/death-squads/torture/looting/nuclear fallout/hired mercenaries/police-state America and permanent war fantasies just yet!
=========================================
Intel report sinks CNN Iran special
Two-hour 'Nuclear' was slated for Dec. 12
By BRIAN LOWRYHOLLYWOOD
7 December 2007
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117977083.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1
-- The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary "We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear."
The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the "CNN Presents" banner, was "set partially in the future," featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials -- playing fictional cabinet members -- debate how to deal with the Iranian threat.
That special was "based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions," said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson, noting that the surprising NIE report "changed everything."
In its place, CNN will this weekend air two Campbell Brown-hosted specials on the Iran situation and its history. Portions of "We Were Warned" correspondent Frank Sesno's original reporting will be incorporated into those hours, which air Saturday and Sunday.
Among those participating in the war-game panel featured as part of "Iran Goes Nuclear" were former CIA director Jim Woolsey, former EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman and former presidential adviser David Gergen.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Eric Alterman's "Top 6 What's Wrong with Major Media" doesn't begin to catch the SHEER CORRUPTION of the Media whores...
Eric Alterman's "the Top 6 Things Wrong with Main-Stream-Media" (below, DOESN'T BEGIN TO SCRATCH THE SURFACE of the SHEER, disgusting, craven, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the Main Stream Media whores.
Need an example? In South Florida, they are pumping RAW SEWAGE into the ocean.. via a huge pipe less than a mile off shore of Broward-Palm Beach County beaches. If the winds and tide are heading back towards shore, the sewage comes RIGHT BACK TO THE BEACH - where it wipes out the fragile reefs, and of course forces swimmers to swim in it. Well, maybe it isn't RAW sewage... maybe it is "once treated" sewage, or even "twice treated" sewage.
WELL, WE DON'T KNOW.. because ALL THREE of South Florida's WHORE "major media" newspapers WON'T COVER that disgraceful scandal! THEY ARE TOO BUSY SELLING LIES, GARBAGE INFORMATION.. and now SHIT,
LITERALLY!
"WELCOME TO FLORIDA! COME SWIM IN OUR SHIT!" should be the new tourism motto of Broward, Palm Beach, and Dade counties. Never in human history, have so many benefited so much from the cheap, renewable, all-but-free natural resource that is the thin line between land and surf of Florida's beaches. (Any "cost" to "maintaining the beaches" involves, not the beaches themselves, but INFRASTRUCTURE adjacent to or on the beaches, or roads and buildings leading to the beaches. Even "beach renourishment" projects, no matter how costly, are about rescuing the DEVELOPMENT threatened by retreating shorelines,.) Florida's once pristine beaches have created MILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars in tourist revenue for South Florida's businesses... but they, the ENTIRE region and state of Florida, will do NOTHING to PROTECT those beaches - from the sewage that beach tourism development has created over the years! Not only that, they- South Florida businesses and especially MEDIA WHORES - CONTINUE TO LURE TOURISTS to VISIT Florida, presumably to SWIM IN THOSE now polluted with fecal bacteria waters!
Florida papers and press have also renounced ANY RESPONSIBILITY to oversee the $7.8 BILLION Everglades Restoration program. This allows the Republican state house to treat the federal TAXPAYER MONEY like a PRIVATE SLUSH FUND - to dole out huge funds to friends and crony contractors, especially connected landowners paid INFLATED PRICES for land that the state would CONDEMN in a New York minute if it was in the way of a highway interchange, but receives prime suburban valuations from the Restoration plan, despite being out in the middle of nowhere. Further, the properties in question would be worthless to agriculture or owners without extensive drainage and water subsidies, yet property owners demand, and get, massively inflated prices because business and the state house look at the "Restoration" project as their cash cow.
ALL THREE SOUTH FLORDIA PAPERS - the PALM BEACH POST, Ft. Lauderdale SUN-SENTINEL, and MIAMI HERALD - are party to these SCANDALS - ENTICING TOURISTS to SWIM IN SEWAGE, and allowing Florida officials to SQUANDER BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of taxpayer restoration funds. And that is just TWO little issues, at three little papers.
The GROSS, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "Major Media" extends from STOLEN ELECTIONS, to WHITEWASHING 9-11 culpability, to pretending that ffemale privates, ordered to "abuse" prisoners at US run Abu Ghraib prison, were acting as "rogue operators" - at a time when the Secretary of Defense, Vice President, and President were OPENLY ASSERTING the " RIGHT" to TORTURE prisoners... TO DEATH! And what is with the Orwellian "DETAINEE" designation for prisoners that the Media Whores and War government love to use? You are "DETAINED" if you are stopped for a few moments, or even hours, or days. When someone is "detained" as a teenager, and remains in American prisons 5 years later, that isn't "detention" - that is prison.
The SHEER, VILE, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "American Major Media" is BOTTOMLESS, and the NEW YORK TIMES, FOX 'news" and other corporate media whores ARE STILL LUSTING to BOMB MORE COUNTRIES, and KILL MORE MILLIONS of Mid-easterners.
=============================================
What's Really Wrong With the MSM?
Eric Alterman "the liberal media" at theNation.com
posted December 6, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/alterman
Of course, far more is wrong with the mainstream media than can be described, or even enumerated, in one column. But let's give it a shot, using only items that have come up since my last column, all of which speak to the issue of why its members have forfeited our collective trust.
1. Its members consistently defer to conservative Republican Presidents with a history of deliberate deception, allowing them to define their terms. "One of the reasons for not [calling chaos in Iraq a civil war] was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement."--Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times.
2. Its members invite Republican Congressmen, known to be not merely unreliable but delusional, to lie about Democratic Congressmen. When challenged, they reply that they cannot be bothered to discern the truth: Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value," one whose members "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth," recently informed the magazine's readers that "tone-deaf" Democrats in the House had passed legislation that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only," and thereby "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The liberal blogosphere, led by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that this statement was categorically false, as the bill reads: "A court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Time eventually printed a correction but refused to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, claiming merely that Democrats and Republicans interpret the bill differently. Klein shrugged off criticism by saying, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Later Republican Peter Hoekstra, who is also on record insisting that the United States had discovered a WMD program in Iraq but that the CIA had conspired to cover it up, revealed that he had been a key source for Klein's reporting.
3. Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and unconcerned with the truth to lie about Democratic presidential candidates on the front page of their newspapers and when confronted respond that it is not their job to determine the truth. The Washington Post's Perry Bacon published a recent front-page article giving voice to right-wing paranoids, racists and assorted hatemongers who insist that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Sources included the Moonie-financed Insight online magazine, Human Events (home to Ann Coulter), demagogues Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, and some guy who posted on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the Obama campaign's denials, nowhere in the piece did Bacon inform readers that these allegations are demonstrably false. In an online chat, the paper's Lois Romano explicitly defended the practice, claiming that "airing some of this and giving [Obama] a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight."
4. Its corporations fire, and then buy the silence of, their own reporters in order to hide the truth, when it involves the draft records of certain conservative Republican Presidents. After being fired by CBS News as the chosen fall-person for Dan Rather's story on George W. Bush's draft avoidance, producer Mary Mapes published Truth and Duty, a book that insisted the story was true, the documents were real and she had been the victim of a deal between CBS's parent, Viacom, and the Bush White House to quash the story. After the book's publication, CBS paid Mapes an undisclosed sum to settle her lawsuit against the company and required her to sign a confidentiality agreement covering the deal. The three other CBS staffers working with Rather on the story were also fired and given settlements, one reportedly worth $3 million. Recall that the documents in question, while never authenticated, have never been proven to be forgeries, and CBS's own committee of inquiry took no position on their veracity.
5. Its members are so in thrall to the powerful conservative Republican figures they cover that they make up excuses for their self-serving behavior. Appearing on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show, Mark Halperin, former political director of ABC News, now a top analyst for ABC and Time, offered his views on the reason Senate minority leader Trent Lott was resigning: "I think that this is a true 'wants to spend more time with his family' case." Halperin was apparently unaware that Lott--whose politically connected brother-in-law was recently indicted on bribery charges--himself failed to offer this lamest of excuses and also that his resignation came just in time to avoid the enactment of a tough new ethics law relating to retiring legislators and their future lobbying practices.
6. Its members ignore the substance of politics and instead focus obsessively on atmospherics, leaving voters clueless about the politicians for whom they are expected to vote. "I've always felt that we did a disservice to voters and the public by filling the news hole with too much horse race and not enough information to let them make a decision on who the best President would be," Halperin explains in a new book. "We should examine a candidate's public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance," he then added in a widely quoted mea culpa on the New York Times op-ed page. Alas, within a week of writing those words, Halperin published two pieces on the Time website that focused exclusively on the various campaigns, with nary a substance-related syllable in either one.
Need an example? In South Florida, they are pumping RAW SEWAGE into the ocean.. via a huge pipe less than a mile off shore of Broward-Palm Beach County beaches. If the winds and tide are heading back towards shore, the sewage comes RIGHT BACK TO THE BEACH - where it wipes out the fragile reefs, and of course forces swimmers to swim in it. Well, maybe it isn't RAW sewage... maybe it is "once treated" sewage, or even "twice treated" sewage.
WELL, WE DON'T KNOW.. because ALL THREE of South Florida's WHORE "major media" newspapers WON'T COVER that disgraceful scandal! THEY ARE TOO BUSY SELLING LIES, GARBAGE INFORMATION.. and now SHIT,
LITERALLY!
"WELCOME TO FLORIDA! COME SWIM IN OUR SHIT!" should be the new tourism motto of Broward, Palm Beach, and Dade counties. Never in human history, have so many benefited so much from the cheap, renewable, all-but-free natural resource that is the thin line between land and surf of Florida's beaches. (Any "cost" to "maintaining the beaches" involves, not the beaches themselves, but INFRASTRUCTURE adjacent to or on the beaches, or roads and buildings leading to the beaches. Even "beach renourishment" projects, no matter how costly, are about rescuing the DEVELOPMENT threatened by retreating shorelines,.) Florida's once pristine beaches have created MILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars in tourist revenue for South Florida's businesses... but they, the ENTIRE region and state of Florida, will do NOTHING to PROTECT those beaches - from the sewage that beach tourism development has created over the years! Not only that, they- South Florida businesses and especially MEDIA WHORES - CONTINUE TO LURE TOURISTS to VISIT Florida, presumably to SWIM IN THOSE now polluted with fecal bacteria waters!
Florida papers and press have also renounced ANY RESPONSIBILITY to oversee the $7.8 BILLION Everglades Restoration program. This allows the Republican state house to treat the federal TAXPAYER MONEY like a PRIVATE SLUSH FUND - to dole out huge funds to friends and crony contractors, especially connected landowners paid INFLATED PRICES for land that the state would CONDEMN in a New York minute if it was in the way of a highway interchange, but receives prime suburban valuations from the Restoration plan, despite being out in the middle of nowhere. Further, the properties in question would be worthless to agriculture or owners without extensive drainage and water subsidies, yet property owners demand, and get, massively inflated prices because business and the state house look at the "Restoration" project as their cash cow.
ALL THREE SOUTH FLORDIA PAPERS - the PALM BEACH POST, Ft. Lauderdale SUN-SENTINEL, and MIAMI HERALD - are party to these SCANDALS - ENTICING TOURISTS to SWIM IN SEWAGE, and allowing Florida officials to SQUANDER BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of taxpayer restoration funds. And that is just TWO little issues, at three little papers.
The GROSS, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "Major Media" extends from STOLEN ELECTIONS, to WHITEWASHING 9-11 culpability, to pretending that ffemale privates, ordered to "abuse" prisoners at US run Abu Ghraib prison, were acting as "rogue operators" - at a time when the Secretary of Defense, Vice President, and President were OPENLY ASSERTING the " RIGHT" to TORTURE prisoners... TO DEATH! And what is with the Orwellian "DETAINEE" designation for prisoners that the Media Whores and War government love to use? You are "DETAINED" if you are stopped for a few moments, or even hours, or days. When someone is "detained" as a teenager, and remains in American prisons 5 years later, that isn't "detention" - that is prison.
The SHEER, VILE, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "American Major Media" is BOTTOMLESS, and the NEW YORK TIMES, FOX 'news" and other corporate media whores ARE STILL LUSTING to BOMB MORE COUNTRIES, and KILL MORE MILLIONS of Mid-easterners.
=============================================
What's Really Wrong With the MSM?
Eric Alterman "the liberal media" at theNation.com
posted December 6, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/alterman
Of course, far more is wrong with the mainstream media than can be described, or even enumerated, in one column. But let's give it a shot, using only items that have come up since my last column, all of which speak to the issue of why its members have forfeited our collective trust.
1. Its members consistently defer to conservative Republican Presidents with a history of deliberate deception, allowing them to define their terms. "One of the reasons for not [calling chaos in Iraq a civil war] was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement."--Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times.
2. Its members invite Republican Congressmen, known to be not merely unreliable but delusional, to lie about Democratic Congressmen. When challenged, they reply that they cannot be bothered to discern the truth: Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value," one whose members "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth," recently informed the magazine's readers that "tone-deaf" Democrats in the House had passed legislation that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only," and thereby "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The liberal blogosphere, led by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that this statement was categorically false, as the bill reads: "A court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Time eventually printed a correction but refused to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, claiming merely that Democrats and Republicans interpret the bill differently. Klein shrugged off criticism by saying, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Later Republican Peter Hoekstra, who is also on record insisting that the United States had discovered a WMD program in Iraq but that the CIA had conspired to cover it up, revealed that he had been a key source for Klein's reporting.
3. Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and unconcerned with the truth to lie about Democratic presidential candidates on the front page of their newspapers and when confronted respond that it is not their job to determine the truth. The Washington Post's Perry Bacon published a recent front-page article giving voice to right-wing paranoids, racists and assorted hatemongers who insist that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Sources included the Moonie-financed Insight online magazine, Human Events (home to Ann Coulter), demagogues Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, and some guy who posted on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the Obama campaign's denials, nowhere in the piece did Bacon inform readers that these allegations are demonstrably false. In an online chat, the paper's Lois Romano explicitly defended the practice, claiming that "airing some of this and giving [Obama] a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight."
4. Its corporations fire, and then buy the silence of, their own reporters in order to hide the truth, when it involves the draft records of certain conservative Republican Presidents. After being fired by CBS News as the chosen fall-person for Dan Rather's story on George W. Bush's draft avoidance, producer Mary Mapes published Truth and Duty, a book that insisted the story was true, the documents were real and she had been the victim of a deal between CBS's parent, Viacom, and the Bush White House to quash the story. After the book's publication, CBS paid Mapes an undisclosed sum to settle her lawsuit against the company and required her to sign a confidentiality agreement covering the deal. The three other CBS staffers working with Rather on the story were also fired and given settlements, one reportedly worth $3 million. Recall that the documents in question, while never authenticated, have never been proven to be forgeries, and CBS's own committee of inquiry took no position on their veracity.
5. Its members are so in thrall to the powerful conservative Republican figures they cover that they make up excuses for their self-serving behavior. Appearing on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show, Mark Halperin, former political director of ABC News, now a top analyst for ABC and Time, offered his views on the reason Senate minority leader Trent Lott was resigning: "I think that this is a true 'wants to spend more time with his family' case." Halperin was apparently unaware that Lott--whose politically connected brother-in-law was recently indicted on bribery charges--himself failed to offer this lamest of excuses and also that his resignation came just in time to avoid the enactment of a tough new ethics law relating to retiring legislators and their future lobbying practices.
6. Its members ignore the substance of politics and instead focus obsessively on atmospherics, leaving voters clueless about the politicians for whom they are expected to vote. "I've always felt that we did a disservice to voters and the public by filling the news hole with too much horse race and not enough information to let them make a decision on who the best President would be," Halperin explains in a new book. "We should examine a candidate's public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance," he then added in a widely quoted mea culpa on the New York Times op-ed page. Alas, within a week of writing those words, Halperin published two pieces on the Time website that focused exclusively on the various campaigns, with nary a substance-related syllable in either one.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Media Whores who trumpetted the "BOMB IRAN NOW!" narrative...
Debunking Iran's Nuclear Program: Another 'Intelligence Failure' -- On the Part of the Press?
by Greg Mitchell
(December 04, 2007)
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003680766
Iraqi WMD redux: The release of the NIE throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has chastened public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. But many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly.
NEW YORK Press reports so far have suggested that the belated release of the National Intelligence Estimate yesterday throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has deeply embarrassed, or at least chastened, public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. Gaining little attention so far: Many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly, which promoted (deliberately or not) the tubthumping for striking Iran.
Surely you remember Sen. John McCain's inspired Beach Boys' parody, a YouTube favorite, "Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran"? That was the least of it. You could dance to it and it had a good beat. Not so for so much of the press and punditry surrounding the bomb. Who can forget Norman Podhoretz's call for an immediate attack on Iran, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last May, as he argued that "the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force -- any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938."
As I've warned in this space for years, too many in the media seemed to fail to learn the lessons of the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure -- and White House propaganda effort -- and instead, were repeating it, re: Iran. This time, perhaps, we may have averted war, with little help from most of the media. In this case, it appears, the NIE people managed to resist several months of efforts by the administration to change their assessment. If only they had stiffened their backbones concerning Iraq in 2002.
For the rest of today and this week, media critics will be offering up all sorts of reminders of the near-fatal claims by many in the press relating to Iranian nukes. Sure to get attention are the scare stories in the summer of 2005 after "proof" of an Iranian nuke program somehow surfaced on a certain laptop, proudly unveiled by offiicials and bought by many in the media then as firm evidence (and now debunked, like much of the "proof" of Iraqi WMD provided by defectors a few years back).
Wth much effort, I've already found this beauty from David Brooks of The New York Times from Jan. 22, 2006, when he declared that "despite administration hopes, there is scant reason to believe that imagined Iranian cosmopolitans would shut down the nuclear program, or could if they wanted to, or could do it in time - before Israel forced the issue to a crisis point. This is going to be a lengthy and tortured debate, dividing both parties. We'll probably be engaged in it up to the moment the Iranian bombs are built and fully functioning."
As recently as this past June, Thomas Friedman of The Times wrote: "Iran is about to go nuclear."
Even more recently, on October 23, 2007, Richard Cohen (like Brooks and Friedman, a big backer of the attack on Iraq) of The Washington Post, wrote: "Sadly, it is simply not possible to dismiss the Iranian threat. Not only is Iran proceeding with a nuclear program, but it projects a pugnacious, somewhat nutty, profile to the world."
More in this vein is sure to come: I found those three quotes without even breaking a sweat. At least Friedman, Brooks and Cohen back some kind of diplomacy in regard to Iran, unlike many of their brethren.
Another Post columnist, Jim Hoagland, exactly one month ago summarized his year-long travels and study surrounding this issue, declaring "unmistakable effort by Iran to develop nuclear weapons....That Iran has gone to great, secretive lengths to create and push forward a bomb-building capability is not a Bush delusion." He added the warning that "time is running out on the diplomatic track."
One week before that, reporting on his trip to Moscow, Hoagland noted Putin's doubts that Tehran will be able to turn enriched uranium into a usable weapon -- but called that failure "implausible."
We'd be remiss if we left out William Kristol, the hawk's hawk on Iran, who for the July 14, 2006 issue of The Weekly Standard called for a "military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions--and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
As often the case, Salon.com's popular blogger, Glenn Greenwald, may have gotten there first. A longtime critic of The Washington Post editorial page and its editor, Fred Hiatt, he has already happily reprinted a few choice passages from the past.
Here is the latest, from a Sept. 26, 2007 editorial in the Post, which flatly denounced Iran's "race for a bomb":
"As France's new foreign minister has recognized, the danger is growing that the United States and its allies could face a choice between allowing Iran to acquire the capacity to build a nuclear weapon and going to war to prevent it.
"The only way to avoid facing that terrible decision is effective diplomacy -- that is, a mix of sanctions and incentives that will induce Mr. Ahmadinejad's superiors to suspend their race for a bomb. ...
Even if Tehran provides satisfactory answers, its uranium enrichment -- and thus its progress toward a bomb -- will continue. That doesn't trouble Mr. ElBaradei, who hasn't hidden his view that the world should stop trying to prevent Iran from enriching uranium and should concentrate instead on blocking U.S. military action ...
"European diplomats say they are worried that escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, if fueled by more sanctions, could lead to war. What they don't make clear is how the government Mr. Ahmadinejad represents will be induced to change its policy if it has nothing to fear from the West."
Greenwald also resurrects Post editorial quotes in this vein going back to 2005, along with this choice snippet from a September online interview with Kenneth Pollack, whose complete wrongheadedness on Iraqi WMD somehow has not kept him from remaining a darling of the press as an expert on Iran's nukes and other Middle East issues:
"Q. How compelling is the evidence that Iranians are developing a nuclear weapons program?
"POLLACK: Obviously, the evidence is circumstantial, but it is quite strong."
I'll provide other examples of pundit malfeasance as they surface.
*
Care to comment or read more press criticism? Go to E&P Editor Greg Mitchell's new blog at
Comment.
by Greg Mitchell
(December 04, 2007)
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003680766
Iraqi WMD redux: The release of the NIE throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has chastened public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. But many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly.
NEW YORK Press reports so far have suggested that the belated release of the National Intelligence Estimate yesterday throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has deeply embarrassed, or at least chastened, public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. Gaining little attention so far: Many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly, which promoted (deliberately or not) the tubthumping for striking Iran.
Surely you remember Sen. John McCain's inspired Beach Boys' parody, a YouTube favorite, "Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran"? That was the least of it. You could dance to it and it had a good beat. Not so for so much of the press and punditry surrounding the bomb. Who can forget Norman Podhoretz's call for an immediate attack on Iran, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last May, as he argued that "the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force -- any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938."
As I've warned in this space for years, too many in the media seemed to fail to learn the lessons of the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure -- and White House propaganda effort -- and instead, were repeating it, re: Iran. This time, perhaps, we may have averted war, with little help from most of the media. In this case, it appears, the NIE people managed to resist several months of efforts by the administration to change their assessment. If only they had stiffened their backbones concerning Iraq in 2002.
For the rest of today and this week, media critics will be offering up all sorts of reminders of the near-fatal claims by many in the press relating to Iranian nukes. Sure to get attention are the scare stories in the summer of 2005 after "proof" of an Iranian nuke program somehow surfaced on a certain laptop, proudly unveiled by offiicials and bought by many in the media then as firm evidence (and now debunked, like much of the "proof" of Iraqi WMD provided by defectors a few years back).
Wth much effort, I've already found this beauty from David Brooks of The New York Times from Jan. 22, 2006, when he declared that "despite administration hopes, there is scant reason to believe that imagined Iranian cosmopolitans would shut down the nuclear program, or could if they wanted to, or could do it in time - before Israel forced the issue to a crisis point. This is going to be a lengthy and tortured debate, dividing both parties. We'll probably be engaged in it up to the moment the Iranian bombs are built and fully functioning."
As recently as this past June, Thomas Friedman of The Times wrote: "Iran is about to go nuclear."
Even more recently, on October 23, 2007, Richard Cohen (like Brooks and Friedman, a big backer of the attack on Iraq) of The Washington Post, wrote: "Sadly, it is simply not possible to dismiss the Iranian threat. Not only is Iran proceeding with a nuclear program, but it projects a pugnacious, somewhat nutty, profile to the world."
More in this vein is sure to come: I found those three quotes without even breaking a sweat. At least Friedman, Brooks and Cohen back some kind of diplomacy in regard to Iran, unlike many of their brethren.
Another Post columnist, Jim Hoagland, exactly one month ago summarized his year-long travels and study surrounding this issue, declaring "unmistakable effort by Iran to develop nuclear weapons....That Iran has gone to great, secretive lengths to create and push forward a bomb-building capability is not a Bush delusion." He added the warning that "time is running out on the diplomatic track."
One week before that, reporting on his trip to Moscow, Hoagland noted Putin's doubts that Tehran will be able to turn enriched uranium into a usable weapon -- but called that failure "implausible."
We'd be remiss if we left out William Kristol, the hawk's hawk on Iran, who for the July 14, 2006 issue of The Weekly Standard called for a "military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions--and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
As often the case, Salon.com's popular blogger, Glenn Greenwald, may have gotten there first. A longtime critic of The Washington Post editorial page and its editor, Fred Hiatt, he has already happily reprinted a few choice passages from the past.
Here is the latest, from a Sept. 26, 2007 editorial in the Post, which flatly denounced Iran's "race for a bomb":
"As France's new foreign minister has recognized, the danger is growing that the United States and its allies could face a choice between allowing Iran to acquire the capacity to build a nuclear weapon and going to war to prevent it.
"The only way to avoid facing that terrible decision is effective diplomacy -- that is, a mix of sanctions and incentives that will induce Mr. Ahmadinejad's superiors to suspend their race for a bomb. ...
Even if Tehran provides satisfactory answers, its uranium enrichment -- and thus its progress toward a bomb -- will continue. That doesn't trouble Mr. ElBaradei, who hasn't hidden his view that the world should stop trying to prevent Iran from enriching uranium and should concentrate instead on blocking U.S. military action ...
"European diplomats say they are worried that escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, if fueled by more sanctions, could lead to war. What they don't make clear is how the government Mr. Ahmadinejad represents will be induced to change its policy if it has nothing to fear from the West."
Greenwald also resurrects Post editorial quotes in this vein going back to 2005, along with this choice snippet from a September online interview with Kenneth Pollack, whose complete wrongheadedness on Iraqi WMD somehow has not kept him from remaining a darling of the press as an expert on Iran's nukes and other Middle East issues:
"Q. How compelling is the evidence that Iranians are developing a nuclear weapons program?
"POLLACK: Obviously, the evidence is circumstantial, but it is quite strong."
I'll provide other examples of pundit malfeasance as they surface.
*
Care to comment or read more press criticism? Go to E&P Editor Greg Mitchell's new blog at
Comment.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
More on GHOULISH TIME magazine's propensity to LIE like Joseph Goebbels...
Time magazine refused to publish responses to Klein's false smears
by Glenn Greenwald
December 4, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/04/time/index.html
The disgraceful behavior of Time Magazine in the Joe Klein scandal has been well-documented. But new facts have emerged that reveal that Time's behavior was far worse than previously thought.
First, Sen. Russ Feingold submitted a letter to Time protesting the false statements in Klein's article. But Time refused to publish it. Sen. Feingold's spokesman said that the letter "was submitted to TIME very shortly after Klein's column ran but the letters department was about as responsive as the column was accurate."
(continued..)
by Glenn Greenwald
December 4, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/04/time/index.html
The disgraceful behavior of Time Magazine in the Joe Klein scandal has been well-documented. But new facts have emerged that reveal that Time's behavior was far worse than previously thought.
First, Sen. Russ Feingold submitted a letter to Time protesting the false statements in Klein's article. But Time refused to publish it. Sen. Feingold's spokesman said that the letter "was submitted to TIME very shortly after Klein's column ran but the letters department was about as responsive as the column was accurate."
(continued..)
Saturday, December 01, 2007
More on Lying Neo-con uber media whore JOE KLEIN's democracy-gutting lies....
CATCHING A MEDIA WHORE in the ACT OF LYING is easy... IT IS JUST THE SHEER VOLUME of their LIES, screeching out at America from the pages of TIME and NEWSWEEK and the WASHINGTON WHORE POST and the suzlberger-owned NEW YORK SLIMES and "I deal with Communist Chinese, while bitching about Communists" Rupert Murdoch's Fox 'news' - that is destroying America, ruining international cooperation (eg, NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES _GUTTED_ by the neo-con/neo-Confederate Bush-Cheney administration), and of course making GREED and THE WORSHIP OF MONEY the driving forces in American media and politics. Here, JOE KLEIN is EXPOSED AS A LYING MEDIA WHORE yet again...
=======================================
TIME Magazine isn't Exactly Shackled to the Truth
A. Alexander, December 1st, 2007
http://www.progressivedailybeacon.com/more.php?page=opinion&id=1753
Only recently, TIME magazine performed an outrageous hit-piece on Congressional Democrats and their plan to restore Constitutional protections to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA). According to TIME's Joe Klein, a longtime and big-time Neoconservative supporter, Democrats were essentially intending to provide terrorists with the same protections afforded innocent and law abiding U.S. citizens. When Salon's Glenn Greenwald called TIME on their ridiculous, false, misleading, and scandalous claim the editor was reluctant to admit fault and to print a retraction
=======================================
TIME Magazine isn't Exactly Shackled to the Truth
A. Alexander, December 1st, 2007
http://www.progressivedailybeacon.com/more.php?page=opinion&id=1753
Only recently, TIME magazine performed an outrageous hit-piece on Congressional Democrats and their plan to restore Constitutional protections to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA). According to TIME's Joe Klein, a longtime and big-time Neoconservative supporter, Democrats were essentially intending to provide terrorists with the same protections afforded innocent and law abiding U.S. citizens. When Salon's Glenn Greenwald called TIME on their ridiculous, false, misleading, and scandalous claim the editor was reluctant to admit fault and to print a retraction
CJR deconstructs a Washington Whore Post/Perry Bacon Jr. HIT PIECE smear-job on Barak Obama....
Is Perry Bacon Serious?
Obama story has no place in the Washington Post
By Paul McLeary
Thu 29 Nov 2007
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/post_75.php
<< In The Washington Post this morning, reporter Perry Bacon Jr. wrote what may be the single WORST campaign ‘08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle. >> [Which, needless to say, is plain old world-class whoredom & a 'major media' propaganda smear job.]
Obama story has no place in the Washington Post
By Paul McLeary
Thu 29 Nov 2007
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/post_75.php
<< In The Washington Post this morning, reporter Perry Bacon Jr. wrote what may be the single WORST campaign ‘08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle. >> [Which, needless to say, is plain old world-class whoredom & a 'major media' propaganda smear job.]
Media Whores CNN, President Jon Klein WHORING "BROWN is EVIL!" (illegal immigrants) as new Wedge-issue for 2008....
We are delighted to hear that UBER WHORES CNN are being targeted for attention by watchdogs such as HuffPost's Marty Kaplan, and we welcome the "competition" of Tim Rutten's new "Corrupt News Network" column in Saturday morning's LATimes. Maybe we (the humble writers/editors here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot.com) can go back to living normal lives, instead of dwelling, over-time, unpaid, in the s***-filled cesspit that is "Major Media" (corporate media) USA.
<< The reason Rutten calls CNN corrupt is the collateral damage to American democracy of the network's campaign to convince advertisers that the eyeballs watching the most trusted name in news think Mexicans Gone Wild is a sexier topic for our country to fight about in 2007 and 2008 than health care, education, the environment, energy, and all the other issues that got shockingly short shrift at the YouTubaganza. >>
===============================
Time Warner: Brown Is The New Gay
by Marty Kaplan
1 December 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/time-warner-brown-is-th_b_74928.html
When I read the funny Saturday morning take-down of me in HuffPo by Bill Robinson, the brother of CNN PR boss Christa Robinson, my immediate reaction was, Jeebus, do I now have to apologize to Dana Perino's brother for being mean to her, too?
Here's Bill Robinson's point: "You want to protest CNN's debate? Conspiracy theories about YouTube videos ain't gonna do it, they just got the highest ratings ever for a political program. Besting the record set by their last debate. No, if you want to get to CNN, then unplug your Time Warner Cable."
He's right. Follow the money - or in this case, the Nielsens. The contradictory doublespeak by the doublestandard-bearers of the best political team on television is merely a wonky journalism sideshow; it's the ka-ching that really counts. After all, when CNN domestic president Jon Klein, and CNN political director Sam Feist, were asked to defend CNN's choice of YouTube questions by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, they both ended up giving the same answer: Wheee! Lookit the ratings! Move over, General Motors; in the age of Big Media, what's good for Time Warner is good for the country. Say goodnight, ladies of the League of Women's Voters; Joe Klein's stock options are back on top, baby!
But now that I've read Tim Rutten's "Corrupt News Network" column in Saturday morning's LATimes, what had been hidden in plain sight has hit me like a ton of bits. Before the debate, I'd been skeptical about CNN's making the Republican presidential candidates face the many YouTubed-in questions about homophobia, the wedge issue driven deep into the country by the reckless Bush-Rove GOP. But Rutten made me realize how 2006 (and 2004 and 2002 and 2000) I was being. In 2007 and 2008, illegal immigrants are the new Other.
That's why, as Rutten points out, the first 35 minutes of the debate were devoted to immigration, despite the fact that (as Pew polls show) 96 percent of Americans don't think immigration is the most important issue confronting the country. But Broken Borders is the ratings-pumping battle cry for CNN's house demagogue, Lou Dobbs, and its ticket to besting the bullies over at Fox. (Glenn Beck, CNN's pet psycho, also does a damn fine job of demonizing darkies.)
The reason Rutten calls CNN corrupt is the collateral damage to American democracy of the network's campaign to convince advertisers that the eyeballs watching the most trusted name in news think Mexicans Gone Wild is a sexier topic for our country to fight about in 2007 and 2008 than health care, education, the environment, energy, and all the other issues that got shockingly short shrift at the YouTubaganza.
<< The reason Rutten calls CNN corrupt is the collateral damage to American democracy of the network's campaign to convince advertisers that the eyeballs watching the most trusted name in news think Mexicans Gone Wild is a sexier topic for our country to fight about in 2007 and 2008 than health care, education, the environment, energy, and all the other issues that got shockingly short shrift at the YouTubaganza. >>
===============================
Time Warner: Brown Is The New Gay
by Marty Kaplan
1 December 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/time-warner-brown-is-th_b_74928.html
When I read the funny Saturday morning take-down of me in HuffPo by Bill Robinson, the brother of CNN PR boss Christa Robinson, my immediate reaction was, Jeebus, do I now have to apologize to Dana Perino's brother for being mean to her, too?
Here's Bill Robinson's point: "You want to protest CNN's debate? Conspiracy theories about YouTube videos ain't gonna do it, they just got the highest ratings ever for a political program. Besting the record set by their last debate. No, if you want to get to CNN, then unplug your Time Warner Cable."
He's right. Follow the money - or in this case, the Nielsens. The contradictory doublespeak by the doublestandard-bearers of the best political team on television is merely a wonky journalism sideshow; it's the ka-ching that really counts. After all, when CNN domestic president Jon Klein, and CNN political director Sam Feist, were asked to defend CNN's choice of YouTube questions by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, they both ended up giving the same answer: Wheee! Lookit the ratings! Move over, General Motors; in the age of Big Media, what's good for Time Warner is good for the country. Say goodnight, ladies of the League of Women's Voters; Joe Klein's stock options are back on top, baby!
But now that I've read Tim Rutten's "Corrupt News Network" column in Saturday morning's LATimes, what had been hidden in plain sight has hit me like a ton of bits. Before the debate, I'd been skeptical about CNN's making the Republican presidential candidates face the many YouTubed-in questions about homophobia, the wedge issue driven deep into the country by the reckless Bush-Rove GOP. But Rutten made me realize how 2006 (and 2004 and 2002 and 2000) I was being. In 2007 and 2008, illegal immigrants are the new Other.
That's why, as Rutten points out, the first 35 minutes of the debate were devoted to immigration, despite the fact that (as Pew polls show) 96 percent of Americans don't think immigration is the most important issue confronting the country. But Broken Borders is the ratings-pumping battle cry for CNN's house demagogue, Lou Dobbs, and its ticket to besting the bullies over at Fox. (Glenn Beck, CNN's pet psycho, also does a damn fine job of demonizing darkies.)
The reason Rutten calls CNN corrupt is the collateral damage to American democracy of the network's campaign to convince advertisers that the eyeballs watching the most trusted name in news think Mexicans Gone Wild is a sexier topic for our country to fight about in 2007 and 2008 than health care, education, the environment, energy, and all the other issues that got shockingly short shrift at the YouTubaganza.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Washington Whore Post BURIES ENRON FRAUD, SEC RULING stories on pages D-1 and D-3....
Today's Washington Post front page leads with more of their favorite fare: Dem. and Republican primary and debate conversational (no hard news) stories... but the post BURIES today's REAL NEWS _DEEP_ in the paper, on pages D-1 and D-3.
On page D-1 is the story "SEC Votes to LIMIT Shareholder Rights." On the heels of the massive ENRON and Arthur Andersen, World Com (etc.) financial scandals, ONE MIGHT THINK that this story deserves FRONT PAGE, A-1 coverage... Republicans are set to LOOSEN the ACCOUNTABILITY of corporations to their stockholders yet again!
Sure enough, BURIED on page D-3 is a Whore Post story "Three Linked to Enron Fraud Plead Guilty."
The Whore Post and "major media" - HELPING the Bush-Cheney Republican Party BURY news of the massive financial scandals and fraud of Enron corp.
This treatment of "hard news" (i.e. burying it) by the Post, also illustrates the COMPLICITY of the Democratic Party 'leadership' of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Harry Reid: They FOLLOW the "conventional wisdom" notion that the SEC story is "no big deal", and ALLOW the Republicans and post to BURY IT deep in the paper's business section.
SEC Votes to Limit Shareholder Rights
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112802196.html?hpid=sec-business
Three Linked to Enron Fraud Plead Guilty
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112802358.html?hpid%3Dsec-business&sub=AR
On page D-1 is the story "SEC Votes to LIMIT Shareholder Rights." On the heels of the massive ENRON and Arthur Andersen, World Com (etc.) financial scandals, ONE MIGHT THINK that this story deserves FRONT PAGE, A-1 coverage... Republicans are set to LOOSEN the ACCOUNTABILITY of corporations to their stockholders yet again!
Sure enough, BURIED on page D-3 is a Whore Post story "Three Linked to Enron Fraud Plead Guilty."
The Whore Post and "major media" - HELPING the Bush-Cheney Republican Party BURY news of the massive financial scandals and fraud of Enron corp.
This treatment of "hard news" (i.e. burying it) by the Post, also illustrates the COMPLICITY of the Democratic Party 'leadership' of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Harry Reid: They FOLLOW the "conventional wisdom" notion that the SEC story is "no big deal", and ALLOW the Republicans and post to BURY IT deep in the paper's business section.
SEC Votes to Limit Shareholder Rights
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112802196.html?hpid=sec-business
Three Linked to Enron Fraud Plead Guilty
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112802358.html?hpid%3Dsec-business&sub=AR
Washington Post's PRINCIPLES of Journalism.. at least back in 1933....
PRINCIPLES of Journalism for the Washington Post, set by purchaser of the ailing newspaper, West Coast financier Eugene Meyer, 1933:
http://www.washpostco.com/history-history-1925.htm
1933
On June 1, a public bankruptcy auction was held on the steps of The Post's E Street Building and the newspaper was sold for $825,000 to Eugene Meyer, a California-born financier. Meyer was not an experienced newspaperman, but he had strong convictions about publishing a newspaper which he expressed in this set of principles:
http://www.washpostco.com/history-history-1925.htm
1933
On June 1, a public bankruptcy auction was held on the steps of The Post's E Street Building and the newspaper was sold for $825,000 to Eugene Meyer, a California-born financier. Meyer was not an experienced newspaperman, but he had strong convictions about publishing a newspaper which he expressed in this set of principles:
* The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.
*The Newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.
*As a disseminator of the news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.
*What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as for the old.
*The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.
*In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.
*The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Update on the TIME magazine WILLFUL DECEIT, PATENTLY FALSE STATEMENTS in their rah-rah SURVEILLANCE story....
Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald are working on the story of TIME magazine publishing a JOE KLEIN article that was FULL OF PATENTLY FALSE statements, if not DELIBERATE LIES. Here an up-date on our previous post, in the form of an open letter by Greenwald to the editors of TIME:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/27/time/index.html
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/27/time/index.html
Mr. Stengel - I'm working on a comprehensive piece for Salon about the process that allowed Joe Klein to publish BLATANTLY FALSE STATEMENTS in his FISA article. I'd like to interview you regarding this matter, including these topics:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/27/time/index.html
*Who edited Joe Klein's piece?
*How could such unambiguously, factually false claims make it into the article, and who is responsible for correcting it?
*Does Time have the responsibility not only to correct mistakes like this but also, where it seems rather clearly to be the by-product of WILLFUL DECEIT on the part of a source, describe how it was tricked?
Could you email me and let me know if you can talk and I can call you, or you can give me a call [phone number]. Thanks -
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Media Whores IGNORE the Washington, DC created IRAQ HOLOCAUST.....
In an excellent commentary, Mark Weisbrot details how the "Major Media," week in and week out, copy or replicate the number one propaganda technique of Nazi Propaganda Minister JOSEPH GOEBBELS:
#1. SMEAR your opponents as subhuman, as enemies of all that is good, and as a threat to your nation
#2. FOCUS on the heroic qualities of those in your party, or on your side, in the war against the evil-doers...
#3. IGNORE the TRUE COSTS of one's policies, either by minimizing the human qualities of the victims, OR NOT MENTIONING THEM (victims) AT ALL.
<< Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied. >>
======================================
Holocaust Denial, American Style
By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNet.
Posted November 21, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/68568/
Institutionally unwilling to consider America's responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.
This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.
The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain's leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.
Amazingly, some journalists and editors - and of course some politicians - dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don't believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.
The methods used in the estimates of Iraqi deaths are the same as those used to estimate the deaths in Darfur, which are widely accepted in the media. They are also consistent with the large numbers of refugees from the violence (estimated at more than four million). There is no reason to disbelieve them, or to accept tallies such as that the Iraq Body Count (73,305 - 84,222), which include only a small proportion of those killed, as an estimate of the overall death toll.
Of course, acknowledging the holocaust in Iraq might change the debate over the war. While Iraqi lives do not count for much in US politics, recognizing that a mass slaughter of this magnitude is taking place could lead to more questions about how this horrible situation came to be. Right now a convenient myth dominates the discussion: the fall of Saddam Hussein simply unleashed a civil war that was waiting to happen, and the violence is all due to Iraqis' inherent hatred of each other.
In fact, there is considerable evidence that the occupation itself - including the strategy of the occupying forces - has played a large role in escalating the violence to holocaust proportions. It is in the nature of such an occupation, where the vast majority of the people are opposed to the occupation and according to polls believe it is right to try and kill the occupiers, to pit one ethnic group against another. This was clear when Shiite troops were sent into Sunni Fallujah in 2004; it is obvious in the nature of the death-squad government, where officials from the highest levels of the Interior Ministry to the lowest ranking police officers - all trained and supported by the US military - have carried out a violent, sectarian mission of "ethnic cleansing." (The largest proportion of the killings in Iraq are from gunfire and executions, not from car bombs). It has become even more obvious in recent months as the United States is now arming both sides of the civil war, including Sunni militias in Anbar province as well as the Shiite government militias.
Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied
#1. SMEAR your opponents as subhuman, as enemies of all that is good, and as a threat to your nation
#2. FOCUS on the heroic qualities of those in your party, or on your side, in the war against the evil-doers...
#3. IGNORE the TRUE COSTS of one's policies, either by minimizing the human qualities of the victims, OR NOT MENTIONING THEM (victims) AT ALL.
<< Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied. >>
======================================
Holocaust Denial, American Style
By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNet.
Posted November 21, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/68568/
Institutionally unwilling to consider America's responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.
This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.
The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain's leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.
Amazingly, some journalists and editors - and of course some politicians - dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don't believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.
The methods used in the estimates of Iraqi deaths are the same as those used to estimate the deaths in Darfur, which are widely accepted in the media. They are also consistent with the large numbers of refugees from the violence (estimated at more than four million). There is no reason to disbelieve them, or to accept tallies such as that the Iraq Body Count (73,305 - 84,222), which include only a small proportion of those killed, as an estimate of the overall death toll.
Of course, acknowledging the holocaust in Iraq might change the debate over the war. While Iraqi lives do not count for much in US politics, recognizing that a mass slaughter of this magnitude is taking place could lead to more questions about how this horrible situation came to be. Right now a convenient myth dominates the discussion: the fall of Saddam Hussein simply unleashed a civil war that was waiting to happen, and the violence is all due to Iraqis' inherent hatred of each other.
In fact, there is considerable evidence that the occupation itself - including the strategy of the occupying forces - has played a large role in escalating the violence to holocaust proportions. It is in the nature of such an occupation, where the vast majority of the people are opposed to the occupation and according to polls believe it is right to try and kill the occupiers, to pit one ethnic group against another. This was clear when Shiite troops were sent into Sunni Fallujah in 2004; it is obvious in the nature of the death-squad government, where officials from the highest levels of the Interior Ministry to the lowest ranking police officers - all trained and supported by the US military - have carried out a violent, sectarian mission of "ethnic cleansing." (The largest proportion of the killings in Iraq are from gunfire and executions, not from car bombs). It has become even more obvious in recent months as the United States is now arming both sides of the civil war, including Sunni militias in Anbar province as well as the Shiite government militias.
Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied
Sunday, November 25, 2007
How they do it: How TIME magazine and other Media Whores LIE to America, week after week.....
Time magazine's FISA fiasco shows how Beltway reporters mislead the country
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday November 25, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/25/klein_fisa/index.html
On Wednesday, I documented that Joe Klein's column in this week's Time Magazine contained multiple false statements about the new FISA bill -- The RESTORE Act -- passed by House Democrats last week. The most obvious and harmful inaccuracy was his claim that that bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and that it therefore "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Based on those outright falsehoods, Klein called the House Democrats' bill "well beyond stupid."
That day, Klein responded on his blog to what I wrote without acknowledging that he was doing so and without even telling his readers what the criticisms were. He insisted that everything he wrote was accurate ("as I reported, [the bill] obliquely gives foreign terrorists the same procedures as American citizens, if not the same rights"). He also said that the RESTORE Act was just "a partisan waste of time, fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists."
Yesterday -- Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend -- Klein returned to the Time blog to write an extremely conditional, weaselly, self-justifying and partial "correction" to what he wrote in the print magazine. There's no indication whether any correction will appear in the print magazine, but the online version of Klein's article contains no such correction and still contains all of his grave misstatements.
I don't want the focus here to be on Klein himself. It's beyond well-established what he is and what a slothful, easily manipulated and dishonest "reporter" he is. As deceitful as the correction itself is (for the reasons set forth below), at least he returned to the issue and finally admitted wrongdoing (Klein: "Clearly, I didn't do sufficient vetting of the facts"), which is more than most of this type of pundit typically does.
* * * * *
What I want to do is examine Klein's conduct here to illustrate how so many Beltway reporters (though not all) function. This is not a matter of some obscure error involving details. Because of what Klein did, Time Magazine told its 4 million readers that the bill passed by the House Democrats "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans" and thus shows how Democrats still can't be trusted on national security. The whole column was built on complete, transparent falsehoods about the key provisions of that bill.
Yet look at Klein's first statement in his "correction":
I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it's difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill's language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.
One can debate whether Klein's original, inaccurate claims about the House FISA bill in his Time article can fairly be called "lies" (as opposed to inexcusably reckless inaccuracies). But this statement by Klein in his "correction" unquestionably is a lie.
There is no confusion possible about whether the House bill -- as Klein originally wrote -- "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court." Anyone who told that to Klein was lying. All you have to do is read the House bill in order to know that. Here is Section 2 of the RESTORE Act -- the very first section after the "Definitions" section:
'CLARIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF NON-UNITED STATES PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES'
Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications-
(1) IN GENERAL - Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.
Nobody who can read basic English can fail to understand what this says. As clearly as it can, the bill says that no warrant is required for communications involving non-U.S. persons outside of the U.S. In fact, individual warrants are not even required when a foreign target communicates with someone inside the U.S.; only general approval by the FISA court of the procedures used to eavesdrop is required (see Sec. 105). Thus, Klein's statements about the bill were indisputably, unquestionably false, and all one had to do is read the painfully clear language of the bill to know that.
But Klein, of course, never bothered to read the bill and still hasn't (even though he is published by Time to "report on" and opine about this bill). Instead, even now, he says that he has spoken with both Republicans and Democrats, and while Democrats insist that what he wrote was false, "the Republican Committee staff disagrees and says [his] reporting is correct."
In other words, Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what the bill does and doesn't do in order to manipulate him into uncritically feeding Time's readers the Rush Limbaugh Line -- namely, that Democrats are giving equal rights to Terrorists and preventing the Leader from eavesdropping on foreign Terrorists. And Klein dutifully wrote down what he was told in Time without bothering to find out if it was true and without ever bothering to talk to any of the bill's Democratic proponents. And no Time Editor knew enough or cared enough to bother correcting any of it. And thus, the unfortunate 4 million Americans who read and trust Time now think that the Democrats' FISA bill does the exact opposite of what it actually does.
That is the real story here. That's how our political system works. Scheming GOP operatives feed whispered lies to their favorite, most gullible, most slothful and/or dishonest Beltway journalists. Gleeful and grateful that they have been chosen for this dirty task, these journalists then scamper and write down what they were told and think that, by doing so, they are engaged in what they call "original reporting" -- which means uncritically passing on what they're told by government sources. As a result, they continue to obfuscate every key political issue and mislead Americans by doing the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.
Even now that Klein knows that he was lied to by his GOP source(s), he still won't say that. Indeed, he does the opposite. He claims that there's some super-complex, clouded ambiguity here that people of good faith (such as his lying GOP operative-source) can see differently (Klein: "I reported as fact a provision of the bill that seems to be disputable, to say the least" and "I was clearly wrong to state as fact something that might not actually be in the bill"). Again and again, Klein defends his lying GOP source by pretending that there is some genuine grounds for disagreement here among good faith ladies and gentlemen that accounts for what he was told.
Worse, Klein now says that none of this really matters anyway, because "we are talking about relatively obscure and unimportant technical details" and his "larger point" about Democrats' excess partisanship is "still true." So Klein's column smeared House Democrats as wanting to protect Terrorists, based on a lie fed to him by GOP sources, and now that it's exposed for what it is, he says that none of that really matters anyway. What matters is that Democrats are still being foolish by not agreeing to the demands of the House Republicans and giving amnesty to telecoms and passing a bill that Republicans like, too.
* * * * *
What a repugnant though vivid microcosm this is for how so many of our Beltway journalists function. They think that their only job is to write down faithfully what they are told by both sides (if we're lucky) and call it a day. If one side is blatantly lying and the other side is telling the truth, that isn't for them to say.
Exactly like a stenographer in a court proceeding, their only job is to record the words that they hear accurately, not to identify what actually is true. And here is Klein admitting -- finally -- that this is exactly what he did (although in this case, he wasn't even a good stenographer since he only wrote down what one side said, not both).
The very idea of a reporter and a major news magazine publishing a piece about a crucial bill that neither the reporter nor any editor has ever even bothered to read is amazing. No blogger that I read regularly would ever think about doing that. But that's how the Bush administration has been able to depict all of its false statements about Iraq, and its illegal spying on Americans, as some sort of complex, impossible-to-resolve "controversy." GOP operatives say "X" and reporters write it down, and it would be terribly "partisan" for them to point out that "X" is actually an outright lie.
Had Klein even bothered to read the Democrats' bill before calling it "well beyond stupid" and passing on lies about it, he would have had a real story. This:
Last week, House Democrats passed a bill that allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners outside of the U.S., but requires court approval to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens inside the U.S. But GOP operatives/politicians have spent the week telling reporters that the bill does the opposite, falsely claiming that it gives the same rights to Terrorists that it gives to U.S. citizens.
Those are the objective facts. That is actually what happened. Yet Klein's function -- like those of most of his colleagues -- isn't to report what actually happened, so he'll never say that. And thus, Time has yet again completely misled its readers on a critical political issue by passing on GOP falsehoods as fact, and they are highly unlikely to do anything in the way of alerting their readers to what they did, let alone reporting the real story here: how and why that happened.
UPDATE: Jane Hamsher breaks this whole matter down to its essence. Atrios adds some observations about what would occur if the Joe Klein situation were reversed.
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday November 25, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/25/klein_fisa/index.html
On Wednesday, I documented that Joe Klein's column in this week's Time Magazine contained multiple false statements about the new FISA bill -- The RESTORE Act -- passed by House Democrats last week. The most obvious and harmful inaccuracy was his claim that that bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and that it therefore "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Based on those outright falsehoods, Klein called the House Democrats' bill "well beyond stupid."
That day, Klein responded on his blog to what I wrote without acknowledging that he was doing so and without even telling his readers what the criticisms were. He insisted that everything he wrote was accurate ("as I reported, [the bill] obliquely gives foreign terrorists the same procedures as American citizens, if not the same rights"). He also said that the RESTORE Act was just "a partisan waste of time, fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists."
Yesterday -- Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend -- Klein returned to the Time blog to write an extremely conditional, weaselly, self-justifying and partial "correction" to what he wrote in the print magazine. There's no indication whether any correction will appear in the print magazine, but the online version of Klein's article contains no such correction and still contains all of his grave misstatements.
I don't want the focus here to be on Klein himself. It's beyond well-established what he is and what a slothful, easily manipulated and dishonest "reporter" he is. As deceitful as the correction itself is (for the reasons set forth below), at least he returned to the issue and finally admitted wrongdoing (Klein: "Clearly, I didn't do sufficient vetting of the facts"), which is more than most of this type of pundit typically does.
* * * * *
What I want to do is examine Klein's conduct here to illustrate how so many Beltway reporters (though not all) function. This is not a matter of some obscure error involving details. Because of what Klein did, Time Magazine told its 4 million readers that the bill passed by the House Democrats "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans" and thus shows how Democrats still can't be trusted on national security. The whole column was built on complete, transparent falsehoods about the key provisions of that bill.
Yet look at Klein's first statement in his "correction":
I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it's difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill's language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.
One can debate whether Klein's original, inaccurate claims about the House FISA bill in his Time article can fairly be called "lies" (as opposed to inexcusably reckless inaccuracies). But this statement by Klein in his "correction" unquestionably is a lie.
There is no confusion possible about whether the House bill -- as Klein originally wrote -- "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court." Anyone who told that to Klein was lying. All you have to do is read the House bill in order to know that. Here is Section 2 of the RESTORE Act -- the very first section after the "Definitions" section:
'CLARIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF NON-UNITED STATES PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES'
Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications-
(1) IN GENERAL - Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.
Nobody who can read basic English can fail to understand what this says. As clearly as it can, the bill says that no warrant is required for communications involving non-U.S. persons outside of the U.S. In fact, individual warrants are not even required when a foreign target communicates with someone inside the U.S.; only general approval by the FISA court of the procedures used to eavesdrop is required (see Sec. 105). Thus, Klein's statements about the bill were indisputably, unquestionably false, and all one had to do is read the painfully clear language of the bill to know that.
But Klein, of course, never bothered to read the bill and still hasn't (even though he is published by Time to "report on" and opine about this bill). Instead, even now, he says that he has spoken with both Republicans and Democrats, and while Democrats insist that what he wrote was false, "the Republican Committee staff disagrees and says [his] reporting is correct."
In other words, Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what the bill does and doesn't do in order to manipulate him into uncritically feeding Time's readers the Rush Limbaugh Line -- namely, that Democrats are giving equal rights to Terrorists and preventing the Leader from eavesdropping on foreign Terrorists. And Klein dutifully wrote down what he was told in Time without bothering to find out if it was true and without ever bothering to talk to any of the bill's Democratic proponents. And no Time Editor knew enough or cared enough to bother correcting any of it. And thus, the unfortunate 4 million Americans who read and trust Time now think that the Democrats' FISA bill does the exact opposite of what it actually does.
That is the real story here. That's how our political system works. Scheming GOP operatives feed whispered lies to their favorite, most gullible, most slothful and/or dishonest Beltway journalists. Gleeful and grateful that they have been chosen for this dirty task, these journalists then scamper and write down what they were told and think that, by doing so, they are engaged in what they call "original reporting" -- which means uncritically passing on what they're told by government sources. As a result, they continue to obfuscate every key political issue and mislead Americans by doing the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.
Even now that Klein knows that he was lied to by his GOP source(s), he still won't say that. Indeed, he does the opposite. He claims that there's some super-complex, clouded ambiguity here that people of good faith (such as his lying GOP operative-source) can see differently (Klein: "I reported as fact a provision of the bill that seems to be disputable, to say the least" and "I was clearly wrong to state as fact something that might not actually be in the bill"). Again and again, Klein defends his lying GOP source by pretending that there is some genuine grounds for disagreement here among good faith ladies and gentlemen that accounts for what he was told.
Worse, Klein now says that none of this really matters anyway, because "we are talking about relatively obscure and unimportant technical details" and his "larger point" about Democrats' excess partisanship is "still true." So Klein's column smeared House Democrats as wanting to protect Terrorists, based on a lie fed to him by GOP sources, and now that it's exposed for what it is, he says that none of that really matters anyway. What matters is that Democrats are still being foolish by not agreeing to the demands of the House Republicans and giving amnesty to telecoms and passing a bill that Republicans like, too.
* * * * *
What a repugnant though vivid microcosm this is for how so many of our Beltway journalists function. They think that their only job is to write down faithfully what they are told by both sides (if we're lucky) and call it a day. If one side is blatantly lying and the other side is telling the truth, that isn't for them to say.
Exactly like a stenographer in a court proceeding, their only job is to record the words that they hear accurately, not to identify what actually is true. And here is Klein admitting -- finally -- that this is exactly what he did (although in this case, he wasn't even a good stenographer since he only wrote down what one side said, not both).
The very idea of a reporter and a major news magazine publishing a piece about a crucial bill that neither the reporter nor any editor has ever even bothered to read is amazing. No blogger that I read regularly would ever think about doing that. But that's how the Bush administration has been able to depict all of its false statements about Iraq, and its illegal spying on Americans, as some sort of complex, impossible-to-resolve "controversy." GOP operatives say "X" and reporters write it down, and it would be terribly "partisan" for them to point out that "X" is actually an outright lie.
Had Klein even bothered to read the Democrats' bill before calling it "well beyond stupid" and passing on lies about it, he would have had a real story. This:
Last week, House Democrats passed a bill that allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners outside of the U.S., but requires court approval to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens inside the U.S. But GOP operatives/politicians have spent the week telling reporters that the bill does the opposite, falsely claiming that it gives the same rights to Terrorists that it gives to U.S. citizens.
Those are the objective facts. That is actually what happened. Yet Klein's function -- like those of most of his colleagues -- isn't to report what actually happened, so he'll never say that. And thus, Time has yet again completely misled its readers on a critical political issue by passing on GOP falsehoods as fact, and they are highly unlikely to do anything in the way of alerting their readers to what they did, let alone reporting the real story here: how and why that happened.
UPDATE: Jane Hamsher breaks this whole matter down to its essence. Atrios adds some observations about what would occur if the Joe Klein situation were reversed.
Wall St. Journal whores the "WACKY LEFT drives Clinton out of mainstream" meme...
In this article the Wall Street Journal whores its favorite meme: that the "loony left" is responsible for all the defeats of losing Democrat candidates and leaders, from John Kerry to Tom Daschle and all the losing Democrats before or after.
But the facts are that Al Gore won the popular vote DESPITE DOING NOTHING to HIGHLIGHT THE PLIGHT OF TEXAS SCHOOLCHILDREN tossed off of pre-school, after-school, and health-care programs by then Texas Gov. George W. Bush's signature TAX CUTS FOR MILLIONAIRES and BILLIONAIRES.
Al Gore ran a miserable campaign that REFUSED to use an issue DEFINING THE CRUELTY and crass greed of the Right-Wing agenda... the agenda that the Whore Street Journal pimps every day, day in and day out, DESPITE that agenda's DEVASTATING IMPACT ON NATIONAL SECURITY.
The Wall Street Journal worships only one god - the god of MONEY, MAMOM, cold profit, AND GREED.
AMERICA DID NOT WIN WWII and become a world superpower by putting GREED and PROFIT above the spirit of MUTUAL COOPERATION and SHARED SACRIFICE.
But the GHOULISH LIARS of the WHORE STREET JOURNAL will FOREVER attempt to justify their "GREED IS GOOD" agenda, through snarky editorials such as this one.
WHORES STREET JOURNAL pimps their "LOONY LEFT DRAGS HILLARY DOWN" insanity:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119577999706601663.html?mod=blogs
But the facts are that Al Gore won the popular vote DESPITE DOING NOTHING to HIGHLIGHT THE PLIGHT OF TEXAS SCHOOLCHILDREN tossed off of pre-school, after-school, and health-care programs by then Texas Gov. George W. Bush's signature TAX CUTS FOR MILLIONAIRES and BILLIONAIRES.
Al Gore ran a miserable campaign that REFUSED to use an issue DEFINING THE CRUELTY and crass greed of the Right-Wing agenda... the agenda that the Whore Street Journal pimps every day, day in and day out, DESPITE that agenda's DEVASTATING IMPACT ON NATIONAL SECURITY.
The Wall Street Journal worships only one god - the god of MONEY, MAMOM, cold profit, AND GREED.
AMERICA DID NOT WIN WWII and become a world superpower by putting GREED and PROFIT above the spirit of MUTUAL COOPERATION and SHARED SACRIFICE.
But the GHOULISH LIARS of the WHORE STREET JOURNAL will FOREVER attempt to justify their "GREED IS GOOD" agenda, through snarky editorials such as this one.
WHORES STREET JOURNAL pimps their "LOONY LEFT DRAGS HILLARY DOWN" insanity:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119577999706601663.html?mod=blogs
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Media Whores work relentlessly TO IGNORE the McClellan "Bush, Cheney Rove, and Card INSTRUCTED ME TO LIE about Plame scandal" story
All The President's Liars: Where the Hell are The Washington Post and New York Times on McClellangate?!
November 21, 2007
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steve_yo_071121_all_the_president_s_.htm
McClellan book publisher furiously backpedals on significance of the books revelation, that Bush, Cheney, Rove, and WH Chief of Staff Andrew Card had WH spokesman Scott McClellan LIE to the American public during the CIA outing scandal....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21917188/
========================
Monday, November 19, 2007
Thomas FRIEDMAN of the New York Time, displays his AIPAC, neo-con, Warmongering INSANITY; calls for DICK CHENEY to be the DEMOCRAT's VP nominee!!
Hat-tip to ThinkProgress.com,
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/19/friedman-keep-cheney-on-for-another-term/
and Mathew Yglasias,
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/worst_oped_day_ever.php
for capturing and pointing out the sheer INSANE WAR LUST of Thomas Freidman and his employer, the "we LOVE TRASHING NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, while THREATENING NUCLEAR ANHILATION to those we declare to be enemies" NEW YORK TIMES.
NO article or editorial ever published by the NEW YORK whore TIMES has ever quite captured the sheer insanity of the TIMES' devotion to the neo-con, Neo-Confederate, AIPAC war-lust, and designs for imperial hegemony and nuclear-backed intimidations -- and there have been many hundreds if not thousands of such NYT articles over the past decade urging, demanding, and white-washing wars, invasions, occuptaions, torture, spyng, and retributon (including WILLIAM SAFIRE's NYT "RETRIBUTION AGAINST FALLUJAH!" op-ed that advocated a massive reprisal against Fallujah that was indistinguisable from German treatment of GUERNICA, the embattled city in Spain bombed to rubble by Luftwaffe bombers during the Spanish Civil War) - as much as this insane THOMAS FRIEDMAN article, calling for DICK CHENEY - of HALLIBURTON STOCK OPTIONS/DEALING WITH IRAQ behind back of US/UN EMBARGO on Iraq infamy! - to be the choice of DEMOCRATS for their VP nominee in the 2008 elections!
Mr. Friedman, Mr. Safire, Mr. Sulzberger, and the entire top echelons of the New York Times have simply GONE BATTY with POWER, GREED, uncheked influence over the US news industry, and neo-con war-lust: it is THEY (and other AIPAC NEO-CON Straussian imperialists) over the past decade who have sought to LEGITIMIZE the Republican Right-Wing agenda to TRASH INTERNATIONAL TREATIES - including prohibition of TORTURE and restraints on NUCLEAR PROLIFERATIO - and who now seek to grind every nation on the earth under the bombs-and-bullets BOOT HEEL of US military "enforcement", aka threats or outright "war on terra" aggression.
THE NEO-CON WAR LUST AGENDA to CONQUER IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA, and CASPIAN OIL NATIONS is INDISTINGUISHABLE from the German desire to CONQUER POLAND, Western Europe, and Russia, except that the Nazis did not have the massive NUCLEAR ARSENAL that Israel and America have today.
=========================================
Channeling Dick Cheney
[i.e., "Dick Cheney for DEMOCRATIC Vice President nominee" !!]
By Thomas Friedman
New York Times columnist
Published: November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18friedman.html
I have no idea who is going to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but lately I’ve been wondering whether, if it is Barack Obama, he might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president.
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Go to Columnist Page » No, I personally am not a Dick Cheney fan, and I know it is absurd to even suggest, but now that I have your attention, here’s what’s on my mind: After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issue that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran. There is a cold war in the Middle East today between America and Iran, and until and unless it gets resolved, I see Iran using its proxies, its chess pieces — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and the Shiite militias in Iraq — to stymie America and its allies across the region.
And that brings me back to the Obama-Cheney ticket: When it comes to how best to deal with Iran, each has half a policy — but if you actually put them together, they’d add up to an ideal U.S. strategy for Iran. Dare I say, they complete each other.
Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously. But Mr. Cheney’s Dr. Strangelove imitation is totally wasted with President Bush and Secretary of State Condi Rice. Because the president and secretary of state have never been able to make up their minds as to what U.S. policy toward Iran should be — to bring about regime change or a change of behavior — it’s impossible to have any effective diplomacy.
If she were taking advantage of Mr. Cheney’s madness, Secretary Rice would be going to Tehran and saying to the Iranians: “Look, I’m ready to cut a deal with you guys, but I have to tell you, back home, I’ve got Cheney on my back and he is truly craaaaazzzzy. You guys don’t know the half of it. He thinks waterboarding is what you do with your grandchildren at the pool on Sunday. I’m not sure how much longer I can restrain him. So maybe we should have a serious nuke talk, and, if it goes well, we’ll back off regime change.”
Instead, we just have Mr. Cheney being Mr. Cheney, but the Bush team neither carrying out his threats nor leveraging them to drive meaningful diplomacy with Tehran. There’s no good cop, it’s just a bad cop/bad cop routine — a big reason our Iran policy has been a failure. It has not stopped the Iranian nuclear program or changed the regime.
“For coercive diplomacy to work you need to be able to threaten what the regime values most — its own survival,” said the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Robert Litwak, author of the book “Regime Change.” “But for coercive diplomacy to work, you also need to be ready to take yes for an answer.”
Mr. Obama, by contrast, has “yes” down pat. As he said on “Meet the Press” last week: “I would meet directly with the leadership in Iran. I believe that we have not exhausted the diplomatic efforts that could be required to resolve some of these problems — them developing nuclear weapons, them supporting terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.”
I think a President Obama offering to go to Tehran would have a huge impact on that country and create lots of internal debate, especially if we made clear that America would be satisfied with a verifiable change of Iranian behavior.
But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient. Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work. When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.
Mr. Obama would also be more effective if he not only stressed how much further he was ready to go than the Bush team to engage Iran, but also how much further he would be ready to go in bringing meaningful leverage on Iran — by, say, opting for a gasoline tax that would help bring down the price of oil, or by abandoning the anti-Russia policies of the Bush team and trying to enlist Vladimir Putin, or China and India, on our side to bring real pressure on Tehran.
In sum, Mr. Obama’s instinct is right — but he needs to dial down his inner Jimmy Carter a bit when it comes to talking to Iran, and dial up a bit more inner Dick Cheney. If Democrats want to win this election, they have to get these two in balance — they have to learn how to criticize the Bush record from the right and the left, to show they can be better at engagement and coercion. Successful diplomacy requires both. Americans will want to know that Democrats can do both. My guess is that many still aren’t sure.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/19/friedman-keep-cheney-on-for-another-term/
and Mathew Yglasias,
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/worst_oped_day_ever.php
for capturing and pointing out the sheer INSANE WAR LUST of Thomas Freidman and his employer, the "we LOVE TRASHING NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, while THREATENING NUCLEAR ANHILATION to those we declare to be enemies" NEW YORK TIMES.
NO article or editorial ever published by the NEW YORK whore TIMES has ever quite captured the sheer insanity of the TIMES' devotion to the neo-con, Neo-Confederate, AIPAC war-lust, and designs for imperial hegemony and nuclear-backed intimidations -- and there have been many hundreds if not thousands of such NYT articles over the past decade urging, demanding, and white-washing wars, invasions, occuptaions, torture, spyng, and retributon (including WILLIAM SAFIRE's NYT "RETRIBUTION AGAINST FALLUJAH!" op-ed that advocated a massive reprisal against Fallujah that was indistinguisable from German treatment of GUERNICA, the embattled city in Spain bombed to rubble by Luftwaffe bombers during the Spanish Civil War) - as much as this insane THOMAS FRIEDMAN article, calling for DICK CHENEY - of HALLIBURTON STOCK OPTIONS/DEALING WITH IRAQ behind back of US/UN EMBARGO on Iraq infamy! - to be the choice of DEMOCRATS for their VP nominee in the 2008 elections!
Mr. Friedman, Mr. Safire, Mr. Sulzberger, and the entire top echelons of the New York Times have simply GONE BATTY with POWER, GREED, uncheked influence over the US news industry, and neo-con war-lust: it is THEY (and other AIPAC NEO-CON Straussian imperialists) over the past decade who have sought to LEGITIMIZE the Republican Right-Wing agenda to TRASH INTERNATIONAL TREATIES - including prohibition of TORTURE and restraints on NUCLEAR PROLIFERATIO - and who now seek to grind every nation on the earth under the bombs-and-bullets BOOT HEEL of US military "enforcement", aka threats or outright "war on terra" aggression.
THE NEO-CON WAR LUST AGENDA to CONQUER IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA, and CASPIAN OIL NATIONS is INDISTINGUISHABLE from the German desire to CONQUER POLAND, Western Europe, and Russia, except that the Nazis did not have the massive NUCLEAR ARSENAL that Israel and America have today.
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Channeling Dick Cheney
[i.e., "Dick Cheney for DEMOCRATIC Vice President nominee" !!]
By Thomas Friedman
New York Times columnist
Published: November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18friedman.html
I have no idea who is going to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but lately I’ve been wondering whether, if it is Barack Obama, he might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president.
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Go to Columnist Page » No, I personally am not a Dick Cheney fan, and I know it is absurd to even suggest, but now that I have your attention, here’s what’s on my mind: After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issue that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran. There is a cold war in the Middle East today between America and Iran, and until and unless it gets resolved, I see Iran using its proxies, its chess pieces — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and the Shiite militias in Iraq — to stymie America and its allies across the region.
And that brings me back to the Obama-Cheney ticket: When it comes to how best to deal with Iran, each has half a policy — but if you actually put them together, they’d add up to an ideal U.S. strategy for Iran. Dare I say, they complete each other.
Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously. But Mr. Cheney’s Dr. Strangelove imitation is totally wasted with President Bush and Secretary of State Condi Rice. Because the president and secretary of state have never been able to make up their minds as to what U.S. policy toward Iran should be — to bring about regime change or a change of behavior — it’s impossible to have any effective diplomacy.
If she were taking advantage of Mr. Cheney’s madness, Secretary Rice would be going to Tehran and saying to the Iranians: “Look, I’m ready to cut a deal with you guys, but I have to tell you, back home, I’ve got Cheney on my back and he is truly craaaaazzzzy. You guys don’t know the half of it. He thinks waterboarding is what you do with your grandchildren at the pool on Sunday. I’m not sure how much longer I can restrain him. So maybe we should have a serious nuke talk, and, if it goes well, we’ll back off regime change.”
Instead, we just have Mr. Cheney being Mr. Cheney, but the Bush team neither carrying out his threats nor leveraging them to drive meaningful diplomacy with Tehran. There’s no good cop, it’s just a bad cop/bad cop routine — a big reason our Iran policy has been a failure. It has not stopped the Iranian nuclear program or changed the regime.
“For coercive diplomacy to work you need to be able to threaten what the regime values most — its own survival,” said the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Robert Litwak, author of the book “Regime Change.” “But for coercive diplomacy to work, you also need to be ready to take yes for an answer.”
Mr. Obama, by contrast, has “yes” down pat. As he said on “Meet the Press” last week: “I would meet directly with the leadership in Iran. I believe that we have not exhausted the diplomatic efforts that could be required to resolve some of these problems — them developing nuclear weapons, them supporting terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.”
I think a President Obama offering to go to Tehran would have a huge impact on that country and create lots of internal debate, especially if we made clear that America would be satisfied with a verifiable change of Iranian behavior.
But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient. Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work. When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.
Mr. Obama would also be more effective if he not only stressed how much further he was ready to go than the Bush team to engage Iran, but also how much further he would be ready to go in bringing meaningful leverage on Iran — by, say, opting for a gasoline tax that would help bring down the price of oil, or by abandoning the anti-Russia policies of the Bush team and trying to enlist Vladimir Putin, or China and India, on our side to bring real pressure on Tehran.
In sum, Mr. Obama’s instinct is right — but he needs to dial down his inner Jimmy Carter a bit when it comes to talking to Iran, and dial up a bit more inner Dick Cheney. If Democrats want to win this election, they have to get these two in balance — they have to learn how to criticize the Bush record from the right and the left, to show they can be better at engagement and coercion. Successful diplomacy requires both. Americans will want to know that Democrats can do both. My guess is that many still aren’t sure.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
New York Times - LYING neo-con WHORES - deconstructed in one paragraph...
In our previous post, we attempted to deconstruct the DECADE, dozen-years-plus neo-con agenda of the New York Times. At every turn, they have boosted and trumpeted invasions, stolen elections, stonewalled investigations, promoted looting-of-the treasury tax cuts for billionaires as economic policy; they have ignored perjury and obstruction of justice re the "outing" of a CIA undercover agent by the White House to smear and intimidate whistleblowers; and they consistently WHITEWASH or ignore or bury deep in their pages dozens of other administration and Republican scandals, including the connections between then president Bush and ENRON Chairman Ken Lay that were far more SCANDALOUS than any Clinton connection to the "Whitewater" routine real estate flop that was only a tiny part of the Republican dominated "DEREGULATIONS" that stiffed American taxpayers with the TRILLION DOLLAR S&L debacle.
Below, a reader comments to Stephen Schlesinger's delusional op-ed, saluting the neo-con New York Times as some sort of paragon of progressive, 'small-d' democratic America.
==========================================
RASPBERRIES TO THE NEW YORK TIMES http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schlesinger/kudos-to-the-new-york_b_73122.html?load=1&page=2#comments
The idea that the Times can rescue itself from journalistic ignominy with a couple of politically correct and ineffective editorials is absurd. You say The Times has "at moments given pause?"
Moments? In total, more like decades, such as the years-long persecution of the innocent Wen Ho Lee, the years-long flagellation of the Clintons over non-existent Whitewater "scandals", the repeated false "reporting" in the years before and after the Iraq invasion (not to mention the internal whitewashing of editorial responsibility for the lies put into print) , the character assassination of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, and even now the Times's Pentagon reporter unquestioningly repeats the flagrant lies about Iran supplying Iraqi insurgents with IEDs and other weaponry.
"Imagine this country without this paper." ? One can only wish! For 7 years The Times's news pages have been to Bush what Pravda was to Brezhnev. Occasional remonstrances from their op-ed pages from the likes of Krugman and Dowd and a few editorials mean nothing compared to the pro-Republican, anti-Democratic propaganda that has permeated their news pages for over a decade.
Below, a reader comments to Stephen Schlesinger's delusional op-ed, saluting the neo-con New York Times as some sort of paragon of progressive, 'small-d' democratic America.
==========================================
RASPBERRIES TO THE NEW YORK TIMES http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schlesinger/kudos-to-the-new-york_b_73122.html?load=1&page=2#comments
The idea that the Times can rescue itself from journalistic ignominy with a couple of politically correct and ineffective editorials is absurd. You say The Times has "at moments given pause?"
Moments? In total, more like decades, such as the years-long persecution of the innocent Wen Ho Lee, the years-long flagellation of the Clintons over non-existent Whitewater "scandals", the repeated false "reporting" in the years before and after the Iraq invasion (not to mention the internal whitewashing of editorial responsibility for the lies put into print) , the character assassination of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, and even now the Times's Pentagon reporter unquestioningly repeats the flagrant lies about Iran supplying Iraqi insurgents with IEDs and other weaponry.
"Imagine this country without this paper." ? One can only wish! For 7 years The Times's news pages have been to Bush what Pravda was to Brezhnev. Occasional remonstrances from their op-ed pages from the likes of Krugman and Dowd and a few editorials mean nothing compared to the pro-Republican, anti-Democratic propaganda that has permeated their news pages for over a decade.
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