When Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson passionately agree on a topic, it's time to stop and take notice. I despise the U.S. government's prosecution of Julian Assange. He has exposed marmongers and war criminals who remain free (many of them are even celebrated in the "news"). Matt Orfalea has compiled a mashup of concurring opinions across the political spectrum. Does the rule of law mean anything to Joe Biden? He could stop this insanity in an instant. The fact that he won't (and that Trump didn't) leads to a very dark place, the story of the great power of non-elected government officials and the power of the exorbitantly monetized U.S. spy state.
CNN has intentionally and repeatedly pushed propaganda, including war propaganda. But they seem perfectly OK with that, as Dave Smith points out.
And now, because CNN's audience continues to shrink, and perhaps out of jealousy that so many people trust Joe Rogan, CNN has gone after Rogan.
Amazingly, CNN still has some dedicated followers: people who uncritically glue themselves to the tube and nod affirmatively. They are doing what many college students have done as they buy term papers from 3rd party providers. They are unwilling to do the hard work of sense-making, relying on a known corporate liar, one that brings lots of war hawks onto their shows to promote military involvement in the Ukraine, the latest alleged reason to spill American blood. This is pure insanity.
BTW, here is that video of Russell Brand imitating CNN's Brian Stelter. While CNN raises a piss-storm about the "problem" with Joe Rogan, it simultaneously parades out warmongers to promote warmongering without disclosing their histories or conflicts of interest.
Many excellent demands in Eric Weinstein's Twitter list. It's a long excellent thread. We wouldn't be in this state of desperation if we had a strong and independent news media, one that constantly fails to demand answers to obvious questions. A "news" media that considers that it main job is to do PR for one (or the other) of our two dominant corrupt political parties.
All of a sudden, we might need to go to war with Ukraine. Amazing how these things suddenly spring to life and most of the mainstream media (including mainstream news media on the Left) gives absolutely no pushback. Here's the NYT doing its part (again) today. An article that lacks any self-reflection about the underlying cause of the current crisis:
If the path forward is unpredictable, what got us here is easy to trace. The row over Ukraine is the outgrowth of an aggressive US posture toward Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, driven by hegemonic policymakers and war profiteers in Washington. Understanding that background is key to resolving the current impasse, if the Biden administration can bring itself to alter a dangerous course.
Russia's central demands – binding guarantees to halt the eastward expansion of NATO, particularly in Ukraine, and to prevent offensive weapons from being stationed near its borders – have been publicly dismissed by the U.S government as non-starters.
In rejecting Russian concerns, the Biden administration claims that it is upholding "governing principles of international peace and security." These principles, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says, "reject the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will."
The US government's real-world commitment to these principles is non-existent. For decades, the US has provided critical diplomatic and military cover for Israel's de-facto annexations, which have expanded its borders to three different strips of occupied territory (the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria's Golan Heights). The US is by far the world leader in dictating policies to other countries, be it who their leaders should be; how little to pay minimum-wage workers; or how to share energy supplies.
Joe Biden last week said the American response in Ukraine would be proportional to Vladimir Putin’s actions. “It depends,” the president posited, thoughts drifting like blobs in a lava lamp. “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…”
Alarms sounded all over Washington. The rip in the national political illusion was so severe, Republicans and Democrats were forced to come out agreeing, leaping into each other’s arms in panic. . . .
This is a rerun of an old story, only with a weaker lead actor. Six years ago, Barack Obama gave an interview to The Atlantic quashing Beltway militarists’ dreams of war in Ukraine:
The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do… This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.
Then as now, both blue and red propaganda outlets howled. The “core interest” of the Washington consensus is war. It isn’t just big business, but our biggest business, one of the last things we still make and export on a grand scale. The bulk of the people elected to congress and a lion’s share of the lobbyists, lawyers, and journalists who snuggle in a giant fornicating mass in the capital are dedicated to the upkeep of the war bureaucracy.
Their main purpose is growing the defense budget and militarizing the missions of other government agencies (from State to the Department of Energy to the CIA). Washington think-tanks exist to factory-generate intellectual justifications for foreign interventions, while attacking with ferocity — as if they were emergencies like pandemics or deadly hurricanes — the appearance of ideas like the “peace dividend” that threaten to move any of their rice bowls to some other constituency.
Both Biden’s comments and the “Obama doctrine” were fundamental betrayals, presidents saying out loud that there existed such a thing as “our” interests separate from Washington’s war pig clique. The latter group somehow believes itself impervious to error, and takes extraordinary offense to challenges to its judgment, amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.
These people consistently lose popularity contests to cannibals and fingernail-pullers, and their playbook — one play they run over and over, never deviating despite decades of disaster — is designed to reduce every foreign policy situation to contests of force. Their wag-the-dog thinking always argues the right move is the one that allows them to empty their boxes of expensive toys, from weapons systems to Langley-generated schemes for overthrows, which a compliant press happily calls regime change."
The corporate media outlets consumed most voraciously by liberals are filled to the brim with war-loving neocons. Liberals catapult their books to the top of best-seller lists, spread their viral tweets, build their credibility into contracts with CNN and NBC News or stints as columnists for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and giddily applaud their cover stories for The Atlantic and The New Yorker.
. . .
The corporate media outlets consumed most voraciously by liberals are filled to the brim with war-loving neocons. Liberals catapult their books to the top of best-seller lists, spread their viral tweets, build their credibility into contracts with CNN and NBC News or stints as columnists for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and giddily applaud their cover stories for The Atlantic and The New Yorker.
Bill Kristol's frequent appearances on MSNBC are due to his high levels of popularity among its liberal audience. One of the most beloved hosts on that network is the former spokesperson of the Bush/Cheney White House and 2004 Bush campaign, Nicolle Wallace. The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt went from producing commercials in 2002 accusing War on Terror critics of being on the side of Al Qaeda to wallowing in "generational wealth” from gullible liberal donors giddy over their similar Trump-era ads accusing their enemies of being Kremlin agents and traitors. Two of The Washington Post's most popular-among-liberal columnists are Jennifer Rubin and supreme war advocate (from a safe distance for him and his family) Max Boot. Security state officials like former CIA Director John Brennan, former Bush CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper became liberal TV stars with their endless accusations that various Trump supporters were unpatriotic and treasonous. And on and on and on.
In his article, Greenwald quotes Adam Smith, who could have written this yesterday:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
I have no doubt that the news media outpouring for the "need" for military action in the Ukraine would be dramatically different if it were Trump who was still president (doing these same things) instead of Joe Biden.
Where are the anti-war voices at the NYT, WP and the Democratic Party? The NYT (Judith Miller and Thomas Friedman) stupidly urged us to go to war in Iraq and they haven't learned a damned thing. Watch Joe Scarborough's hawkish rant at 30 sec mark of this video. It's surreal. What real national interest does the US have in the Ukraine that we are willing to risk military action against a country with well-stocked nuclear arsenal? And where do we hear anti-war voices on the mainstream media? FOX. This is insane. Here is Glenn Greenwald's comment on this bizarre situation:
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