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Banned
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I predict there will be much more talk about "war criminals" of the Bush administration. I think it is important that the political events that will truly "go down in history" not be eclipsed on this forum by discussions about people and events that will end up of little consequence. Jeremiah Wright and the "Black Judge" video immediately come to mind.
This forum has the same problem as the greater world does:
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...dia/index.html
The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell
The U.S. government suspended the Fourth Amendment and expressly authorized torture. The attorney general lied about how the 9/11 attack happened. Barack Obama can't bowl well. Which revelations did the media cover?
Glenn Greenwald
Apr. 05, 2008 | (updated below - Update II)
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079
And as Eric Boehlert <a href="http://mediamatters.org/columns/200804020003">documents</a>, even Iraq -- that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight -- has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. "The Clintons are Rich!!!!" will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.
"Media critic" Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html">his column</a> to Obama's bowling and eating habits and how that shows he's not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson devoted her <a href="http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_carlson&sid=aAa467CxhOvU">whole column</a> this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama's bowling was his biggest mistake, a "real doozy."
Obama's bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/opinion/05collins.html?hp">today observed</a> that Obama went bowling "with disastrous consequences." And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/3205">from the Right</a>, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a <a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1727502,00.html">typically cliched and slimy article</a>, Time's Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama's "Patriotism Problem," where we learn that "this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what's wrong with America than what's right." He trotted it all out -- the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama's angry, America-hating wife, "his Islamic-sounding name."
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.
Our nation's coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that . . . the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly. In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Great-American-Hypocrites-Toppling-Republican/dp/0307408027/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206617559&sr=8-1">Great American Hypocrites</a>, I described the process as follows in the context of examining the three-week-long media obsession with John Edwards' haircut (to the exclusion of a whole array of revelations about what the government was doing or planning to do) and how they justified that coverage:
Most certainly, the press will pretend to be above it all ("this is not something that we, the sophisticated political journalists, care about, of course"). But they yammer about Drudge-promoted gossip endlessly, and then insist that their own chattering is proof that it is an important story that people care about. And because they conclude that "people" (i.e., them) are concerned with the story, they keep chirping about it, which in turn fuels their belief that the story is important. It is an endless loop of self-referential narcissism -- whatever they endlessly sputter is what "the people" care about, and therefore they must keep harping on it, because their chatter is proof of its importance.
<h3>They don't need Drudge to rule their world any longer because they are Matt Drudge now. </h3>
Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. <h3>Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as -- all in a couple of weeks time -- it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation's top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem...kasey_on_f.php
so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama's bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn't you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?.....</h3>
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The corporate media has not even bothered to report about the following comments, from Chris Matthews' Show, a few days ago. If there was a "fart joke" told, a new tidbit about Spitzer's prostitute, another dig at Obama or Hillary, or some new allowance made by the press to explain away another McCain misspoken "gaffe", it would be newsworthy though, right?
Quote:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/0...war-criminals/
The Chris Matthews Show: Andrew Sullivan Calls Rumsfeld, Addington & Yoo War Criminals
By: Nicole Belle on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 6:35 AM - PDT
Download | Play Download | Play (ht Heather)
Every week on The Chris Matthews Show, Matthews has a segment where he asks his panel of pundits to “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.” This week, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic spoke as bluntly as any talking head has done since Bush/Cheney took office:
The latest revelations on the torture front show—the memo from John Yoo—as well as revelations from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Torture-Team-Rumsfelds-Betrayal-American/dp/0230603904/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207471303&sr=8-1">Phillippe Sands’ book</a>, <h3>mean that Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be at some point indicted for war crimes. They deserve to be.</h3>
Damn straight. Phillippe Sands has an article in <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805">this month’s Vanity Fair</a> highlighting aspects of his book, which comes out next month.
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If we don't talk about the significant political issues of "our time", the key issues that this era will end up being known for, in this instance, notorious for, why fence this area off as a "politics" thread, if it's biggest "draws" are the same as the ones everywhere else?
Last edited by host; 04-07-2008 at 04:03 PM..
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