Preface
Last week, Pakeha sent me an intelligent, reasonable, well-written analysis of questions raised by the "War on Terror". I started to write a response, and it quickly devolved into the frothing rant that you see here. But I figured, hey, why inflict this on only one person, when I can inflict it on the other two or three people who read my columns?
You're certainly not the only person worried about the consequences of this whole War on Terror thing.
Liberal-leaning sites like Blah3.com, Media Whores Online, and bartcop have been railing against the beating of war drums. Some sfgate.com columnists have written about it, but most of the press comes from foreign sources. The Guardian (UK) has had articles about this nonsense for a while now.
Fortunately, it seems like the number of articles about how the media is Bush's own cheering squad is starting to increase:
"November 7, 2002—The national broadcast and print news media's
inability to critically assess George W. Bush's foreign and domestic
policies and to serve as a watchdog for the public's interest is
nothing less than a threat to the country's democratic processes.
Not only has the national news media been unable to piece together a
cogent and balanced review of Bush's policies, it has helped the
administration to shape and spin national debate and muddy the
waters to cover its actual intentions."
I'm getting sick of Newsweek, because they keep assigning Howard Fineman to write articles about Bush or politics in general. If the bastard has to admit something less-than-stellar about the Bush Family, he then adds something about a democrat that sounds even worse. For instance, in an article about the Bushes and Clintons running around the country supporting various candidates, he mentioned how Poppy was a tad mean to some democratic candidate. But then he went into faux-shocked-gossip mode about how Hillary Clinton referred to Chimpy as "the president select". Oh, ho, Hillary is a horrible shrew! Except, you know, correct. Far be it from Howie to ask why the current president is spending all of his time raising money for his cronies (at our expense) when there's a War on Terror going on, which Bush keeps telling us is our Number One Super-Important priority. We have to get Osama...er...Saddam! NOT Osama! FORGET Osama!
Oh, hey, Osama released a message. Thank goodness he had the decency to wait until after the election!
And then they let George Will write columns. Sometimes he's reasonable, but often he's a conservative nutbag. Like when he wrote a column decrying the fact that Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was snarling that Carter shouldn't have received it because he didn't solve all of the problems in the Mideast, and some of the provisions of the accords might not have been perfect. Now, while he's correct that peace wasn't secured in the Mideast, I think that hindsight is damned cheap way of attacking someone who at least got the opposing parties to even talk to each other. Plus, how many peace accords have republican ex-presidents brokered? How often do you see Poppy Bush busting his ass building low-income housing? Sorry, I'm just not appreciating how difficult it is to spend all of one's time shuttling between golf games, speaking engagements, and the boards of major multinational corporations. Forgive me.
But even with those as the extremes, the idea of "liberal media" is a joke, when a state of constant war is so much more profitable. The above-mentioned sites have pointed this out, and comics like This Modern World are all over that sort of thing.
Ok, another huge quote:
From Harper's Weekly:
"It was reported that Admiral John M. Poindexter, who was convicted
in the Iran-Contra affair in 1990 but later acquitted on a
technicality, joined the Bush Administration earlier this year as
head of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.
Poindexter is in charge of a new system called Total Information
Awareness, which would permit the military to spy on the civilian
population of the United States without search warrants by scanning
personal information such as email, credit-card statements, banking
and medical records, and travel documents for patterns that suggest
criminal or terrorist activities. Deployment of the surveillance
technology would require new legislation, since the military
traditionally has not been allowed to spy on ordinary American
citizens.
"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America,"
said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center, "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is
Darpa, and the agency is the FBI. The outcome is a system of
national surveillance of the American public."
This makes me want to scream. Why, exactly, did we go to war with Germany back in '41? Oh, right, that's ancient history, and I should just get over it, just like the 2000 (s)election. Just like the Republicans so quickly got over the Whitewater non-event, and never, ever bring up Clinton's name.
"The American people have spoken. And they have said, 'Duhhh, I likes chockomut ice cream.'"
I almost hurt myself laughing every time I read that. But it's definitely a "because it's true" sort of funny, and my laughter borders on hysteria.
And don’t even get me started on the question of a rigged election.