Choosing Sides

Maybe the right-wing scripts should have been recorded on something other than toilet paper. The internecine sniping seems to be increasing:

Andrew Sullivan catches a wingnut being stupid:

You begin to glimpse the mindset of the far right reading a say-anything apparatchik like Hewitt:

We have Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. They have Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews.

Leave aside the idiotic right-left, us-them crapola. Are we really supposed to believe that Chris Matthews is equatable with Michael Savage? That Olbermann, however partisan and shrill he can be, is the equivalent of the fag-baiting, Hitler-equating bigot, Coulter?

Sullivan's new attentiveness to the wacko right is kind of adorable. (It's kind of like watching a two year old discover what he makes in his nappy.)

The really funny thing is that comparing Savage and Coulter to Olbermann and Matthews is actually an improvement on their long standing liberal media critique. It wasn't long ago that Savage and Coulter were considered to be the answer to Dan Rather and Katie Couric. Baby steps.

(It's even funnier, by the way, to read the whining on the right about the left's fearsome message machine and well-funded infrastructure. Booga-booga.)

As for me, there's no way Matthews is on the Olbermann squad. Maybe they work out of the same gym, but Matthews in general is far more of a soul-mate from what I can tell for Savage and the Fox crew. There's no way his record justifies any possible consideration of him as a critic of the Iraq war, anything beyond the meekest questioner of the bush administration (no cajones for that in Chris), or anything resembling even a true centrist. He's unquestionably one of the poster-children of the corporate-owned, administration-supporting apparatchik. From what I have seen, he has always been at best a pathetic patsy and administration toady for many years.

We need to re-choose these teams. Coulter, Matthews, and Savage vs., say, Olbermann, Greenwald, and Krugman.

Now that's a reasonable match-up.

The Pentagon's Propaganda: the Start of Fascism?

The New York Times featured an excellent lengthy article on Sunday that reflects doubly well on the Gray Lady, as it is based on their lawsuit that pried a lot of important material out of the Department of Defensiveness. This is one of those rare departures from the apparent SOP for mainstream media these days to have the guts to criticize sorry little Georgie's operation and risk offending their uber-bosses and shareholders, whose concerns are all about bottom line, not at all about a minimally-functional fourth estate (well, it's probably fifth at best by now):

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

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Glenn Greenwald helps us more intelligently grapple with the NYT's article:

[Sunday] morning’s “blockbuster” New York Times article by David Barstow, documenting the Pentagon and U.S. media’s joint use of pre-programmed “military analysts” who posed as objective experts while touting the Government line and having extensive business interests in promoting those views, is very well-documented and well-reported. And credit to the NYT for having sued to compel disclosure of the documents on which the article is based. There are significant elements of the story that exemplify excellent investigative journalism.

At the same time, though, in light of questions on this very topic raised even by the NYT back in 2003, it is difficult to take the article’s underlying points seriously as though they are some kind of new revelation. And ultimately, to the extent there are new revelations here, they are a far greater indictment of our leading news organizations than the government officials on whom it focuses.

In 2002 and 2003, when Americans were relentlessly subjected to their commentary, news organizations were hardly unaware that these retired generals were mindlessly reciting the administration line on the war and related matters. To the contrary, that’s precisely why our news organizations — which themselves were devoted to selling the war both before and after the invasion by relentlessly featuring pro-war sources and all but excluding anti-war ones — turned to them in the first place. To its credit, the article acknowledges that “at least nine” of the Pentagon’s trained military analysts wrote Op-Eds for the NYT itself, but many of those same sources were also repeatedly quoted — and still are routinely quoted — in all sorts of NYT news articles on Iraq and other “War on Terrorism” issues, something the article fails to note.

What the article also does not disclose, but should have, is that the NYT itself already published, back on March 25, 2003, right after the invasion of Iraq, an article by John Cushman raising the thorny questions posed by the media’s extensive reliance on retired generals as “military analysts”:

Old soldiers, it turns out, don’t just fade away not when a war is being carried live on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the broadcast networks. Instead, a whole constellation of retired one-, two-, three- and four-star generals — including many who led the recent wars in Afghanistan, Kosovo and the Persian Gulf — can be seen night and day across the television firmament, navigation aids for viewers lost in a narrative that can be foggier than war itself. . . .

But the generals’ performances raise some questions, including how much they really know and whether they are disclosing more than they should. Some receive occasional briefings from the Pentagon, but like most reporters, they stay current by checking with their friends in the military and studying all the public information they can gather.

On the other hand, their evident sympathies with the current commanders, not to mention their respect for the military and immersion in its doctrines,sometimes seem to immunize them to the self-imposed skepticism of the news organizations that now employ them.

Rarely, unless pressed, do the generals bluntly criticize the conduct of the war, a detailed review of their recent remarks discloses. Instead, they tend gravely to point out the timeless risks of combat.

That 2003 article, at the very beginning, highlighted the obvious conflicts raised by this morning’s article, as it quoted Gen. Greg Newbold on ABC News as praising the invasion as follows: “If things haven’t gone exactly according to script, they’ve gone according to plan,” even though Newbold himself “until late last year [] was helping to draw up those plans as the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

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Michael Moore on Obama's Inherent Decency

I have been missing the voice of Michael Moore for some time. He is not to everyone's taste, I know, many squeamish for any number of reasons (possibly even including, though rarely admitted, his physical appearance - oh spare me), even amongst enlightened folks who know how badly astray our country has gone in the last 7 - or 15 - or 30 years. But whether you like him or not (I trust that at least in this somewhat narrow audience "not liking" is about as negative as we need to get, right?), I would argue that he is rarely far from the bulls-eye.

And it is a delight that somehow I can hear his movie-voice in this post. I apologize for quoting so extensively, but the man was on such a roll that I had trouble excerpting:

Friends,

I don’t get to vote for President this primary season. I live in Michigan. The party leaders (both here and in D.C.) couldn’t get their act together, and thus our votes will not be counted.

So, if you live in Pennsylvania, can you do me a favor? Will you please cast my vote — and yours — on Tuesday for Senator Barack Obama?

I haven’t spoken publicly ’til now as to who I would vote for, primarily for two reasons: 1) Who cares?; and 2) I (and most people I know) don’t give a rat’s ass whose name is on the ballot in November, as long as there’s a picture of JFK and FDR riding a donkey at the top of the ballot, and the word “Democratic” next to the candidate’s name.

Seriously, I know so many people who don’t care if the name under the Big “D” is Dancer, Prancer, Clinton or Blitzen. It can be Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Barry Obama or the Dalai Lama.

Well, that sounded good last year, but over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the debate last week was the final straw. I’ve watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name “Farrakhan” out of nowhere, well that’s when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the “F” word to scare white people, pure and simple. Of course, Obama has no connection to Farrakhan. But, according to Senator Clinton, Obama’s pastor does — AND the “church bulletin” once included a Los Angeles Times op-ed from some guy with Hamas! No, not the church bulletin!

This sleazy attempt to smear Obama was brilliantly explained the following night by Stephen Colbert. He pointed out that if Obama is supported by Ted Kennedy, who is Catholic, and the Catholic Church is led by a Pope who was in the Hitler Youth, that can mean only one thing: OBAMA LOVES HITLER!

Yes, Senator Clinton, that’s how you sounded. Like you were nuts. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity. How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you. You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can’t win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry “Uncle (Tom)” and give it all to you.

But that can’t happen. You cast your die when you voted to start this bloody war. When you did that you were like Moses who lost it for a moment and, because of that, was prohibited from entering the Promised Land.

How sad for a country that wanted to see the first woman elected to the White House. That day will come — but it won’t be you. We’ll have to wait for the current Democratic governor of Kansas to run in 2016 (you read it here first!).

There are those who say Obama isn’t ready, or he’s voted wrong on this or that. But that’s looking at the trees and not the forest. What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change. My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate.

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Finally, I want to say a word about the basic decency I have seen in Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton continues to throw the Rev. Wright up in his face as part of her mission to keep stoking the fears of White America. Every time she does this I shout at the TV, “Say it, Obama! Say that when she and her husband were having marital difficulties regarding Monica Lewinsky, who did she and Bill bring to the White House for ’spiritual counseling?’ THE REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT!”

But no, Obama won’t throw that at her. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be decent. She’s been through enough hurt. And so he remains silent and takes the mud she throws in his face.

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Pennsylvania, the state that gave birth to this great country, has a chance to set things right. It has not had a moment to shine like this since 1787 when our Constitution was written there. In that Constitution, they wrote that a black man or woman was only “three fifths” human. On Tuesday, the good people of Pennsylvania have a chance for redemption.