A New Well-Documented Love Story: Democrats and America’s Spy State

Two related things of note. First, Glenn Greenwald notes that Democrats are falling in love with America's Deep State:

What the fuck is happening to Democrats?  We have tons of recent evidence telling us that the deep state exists and that it comprises anti-democratic poison coursing through our country's arteries.

Matt Taibbi writes:

Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.

We found out top intelligence officials like CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and got away without perjury charges despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s systematic use of torture techniques, ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of. . . . Pre-Trump, all of this spoke to the worst nightmares of American liberalism. Millions of Boomers and Gen-Exers alike had grown up worshipping at the altar of Miranda and Mapp v. Ohio, believing the ideas of due process and transparency inviolable.  . . .

Young or not, the average commentator now is both committed to forgetting the sordid history of agencies like the CIA, and perfectly equipped mentally to keep that commitment. . . .

Then Trump arrived. Almost immediately, it was obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started talking about it. Deep state warriors like Brennan, Clapper, and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, held in near-universal disdain before as some of the world’s most loathsome people, people so morally ugly it showed on their hideous faces, became immediately respectable by rebranding themselves as Trump critics. The early Trump years, in fact, made heroes of every tumescent peeping-Tom creep and spook in the federal register, now cast in the press as democracy’s infantry, saving the world through intercepts, informants, and leaks.

In a flash, programs that terrified American liberals previously, like FISA, became weapons of Holy War, in the ongoing campaign to Oust Trump via a succession of investigations and impeachment bids. When it came out that a known FBI informant spied on presidential candidate Trump, pundits not only cheered, they refused outright to call it spying.

. . . .

The cultural memories of the coming wave of media professionals extend back a few years at most. Most have read thousands more tweets than book pages. Their opinions come mainly from the dung-pile of popular news and are in sync with most Democrats, whom polls consistently show to have strong majority favorable views of the CIA and the FBI, a dramatic turnaround from the pre-Trump years. In fact, now that the War on Terror has ostensibly been reconfigured to target gun owners, white supremacists, and “insurrectionists,” they can scarcely remember why they ever felt negatively about the NSA or the folks at Langley, which of course makes them perfect for their jobs. In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience.

If this is not enough to make you cry a river, Taibbi reminds us that the liberal news media is infested with spooks:
Now, just like any other tinpot third-world country, we get our news directly from secret agents. I made a list once:

Continue ReadingA New Well-Documented Love Story: Democrats and America’s Spy State

“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

Matt Taibbi explains that the modern version of "news" is religion. All honest people know this. That is why so many smart people of all political persuasions lament that there is far too much "fake news," many of them telling me that they now longer watch "the news." Taibbi's article: "The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War - When political narrative replaces faith, truth becomes heresy." Here's an excerpt:

News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

BTW, check out the video in Taibbi's article for a reminder of how networks used to report the news.

Continue Reading“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished . . .

From the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a story where one of the heroes goes to prison:

A year on from the FinCEN Files investigation, the United States Treasury unit at the heart of the global exposé is now “working overtime” to implement major anti-money-laundering reforms, while the whistleblower whose leaked documents sparked the investigation languishes in prison.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, BuzzFeed News and more than 100 media outlets published the FinCEN Files in September 2020, uncovering more than $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions flowing through the global financial system, passing through U.S.-based banks with relatively few impediments.

. . .

While the FinCEN Files has been widely lauded and cited over the past year as a key driver for global money-laundering reform, the former FinCEN official-turned-whistleblower who originally provided the thousands of documents at the core of the investigation reported to prison earlier in September to serve six months for sending the confidential documents to a BuzzFeed News reporter.

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards was first arrested in 2018, more than two years before the FinCEN Files was published. After pleading guilty last year to sending highly secretive suspicious activity reports from FinCEN to a reporter, she was finally sentenced in June this year.

“I’m absolutely proud of what I did,” Edwards told BuzzFeed News in an interview before reporting to a federal women’s prison in West Virginia earlier this month. “My motive was accountability, and the American people had a right to know what was occurring within Treasury and that it was a national security issue and that American lives were in jeopardy.”

Continue ReadingNo Good Deed Goes Unpunished . . .

Politico Comes Full Circle on Hunter Biden Laptop Archive: Provides Window into Massive Corruption by News Media

Now that the presidential election is over, Politico's reporter has admitted that many documents found on Hunter Biden's laptop were authentic. This finding reverses the pre-election position of Politico, and is not a mere factoid. Rather, this admission corroborates Glenn Greenwald's analysis and evidence that left-leaning media was corrupt and complicit with the deep state leading up to the election. In sum, reporters refused to do their jobs as reporters and it led to fake news. I used to hate that term, but I can no longer deny that large swathes of our "news" is concocted . . . fake (e.g., several years of hysterical fact-free reporting on alleged Trump-Russia connection). The motivation was always clear - - left-leaning legacy news outlets hated Trump and made it their mission to avoid four more years of Trump.

Do I need to repeatedly write that I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and that I find Trump deranged, incompetent and dangerous? My concern in this post is not about who would make the better president. My concern is that the news media should always do its job, publishing important facts regardless of who the evidence helps or hurts, allowing the voters to decide what is important. The opposite of that happened regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, part of a growing trend. In the new way of discussing important national issues, one denies or hides evidence that conflicts with one's preferences. Proud and arrogant confirmation bias is the way many of us make decisions now, instead of relying on Enlightenment values. These are sad days, indeed. It reminds me of how we formerly ridiculed Pravda, the official newspaper of the communist party of the USSR.

Greenwald's Tweet on the Politico reversal is the first of a long thread that makes an airtight case against the news media. I highly recommend the entire thread:

Continue ReadingPolitico Comes Full Circle on Hunter Biden Laptop Archive: Provides Window into Massive Corruption by News Media

In War, Truth is the First Victim

For decades, the U.S. government has tried to define "militant" or "terrorist" to mean any non-American person who dies when an American weapon explodes. We've seen twenty years of these lies and uncountable other lies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. When caught, the military nonchalantly "corrects the record" without apology or explanation, even though there was no basis for the initial claim. A dramatic example of this occurred when Wikileaks (see "Collateral Murder" video) exposed the killings of Reuters employees who the U.S. claimed were "terrorists." It recently happened again in a dramatic way, as CENTCOM's mendacity has been exposed. Those dead "terrorists" turn out to have been an aid worker and a family, including multiple children. In wars, truth is the first victim.

As Glenn Greenwald noted, much of the legacy news media (including the NYT and WaPo) played right along with the initial lie. This is one of those rare cases where the reporters kept digging.

One more Tweet channels my frustration:

Continue ReadingIn War, Truth is the First Victim