Billmon: He’s Back

One of my favorite bloggers is back, after taking some time off from the blogsphere. I guess that news that the Bush Administration is “preparing” plans to use tactical nuclear weapons against another country is — or ought to be — enough to rustle anyone out of any hibernation. However, as Billmon notes, the erroneously labeled Liberal Media blissfully (and irresponsibly) slumbers, even as the self-anointed “war president” makes plans to use nuclear weapons for only the third time in world history. Billmon writes:

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been at least a little bit surprised by the relatively muted reaction to the news that the Cheney Administration and its Pentagon underlings are racing to put the finishing touches on plans for attacking Iran – plans which may include the first wartime use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki.

I mean, what exactly does it take to get a rise out of the media industrial complex these days? A nuclear first strike against a major Middle Eastern oil producer doesn’t ring the bell? Must every story have a missing white woman in it before the cable news guys will start taking it seriously?

I suppose I could understand it if all we had was Sy Hersh’s word that the administration is planning another "pre-emptive" war in the Middle East. After all, we’re talking about the same reporter who peddled all those crazy, unsubstantiated allegations about torture at Abu Ghraib prison. You can’t be too careful with a journalistic loose cannon like that.

[...]

Even by the corrupt and debased standards of our times, this is a remarkable thing. The U.S. government is planning aggressive nuclear war (the neocons can give it whatever doublespeak name they like, but it is what it is); those plans have been described in some detail in a major magazine and on the front page of the Washington Post; the most the President of the United States is willing to say about it is that the reports are "speculative" (which is not a synonym for "untrue") and yet as I write these words the lead story on the CNN web site is:

ABC pushes online TV envelope
ABC is going to offer online streams of some of its most popular television shows, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," for free the day after they first air on broadcast TV.

It appears our long national journey towards complete idiocy is over. We’ve arrived.

Go read Billmon, and is you’re not satisfied, amused, provoked and/or riled up, you can register your complaint here.

Downing Street Memos and the Media Triangle

Our media should really bow their heads in shame. Not only did they fail to fulfil their watch dog role three years ago, before the republican president engaged in his war of choice against Iraq, our media now fails to inform the public on just how it was that Bush and crew willfully mislead our nation into war. All right, all right, so am being a little harsh, but that’s only because I care — my rancor comes from a place of love; love for the ideal of what committed and idealistic journalists can and do do for democracy. Well, I guess I should also add that there are two kinds of media journalists, really. There are print journalists, whom by enlarge have done a far, far better job than their counterparts in the broadcast media.

It is this second group, broadcast journalists, that should really be taken to the woodshed, and not be let out till they’ve done their penance — the fact is that these journalists are just glorified TelePrompTer readers, always in pursuit of ratings to please their corporate masters. I would go as far as denying these TelePrompTer readers any media credentials and barring them from all newsrooms — they simply don’t deserve to even be called journalist nor to be associated with anything having to do with news.

And now to the point of my rant.

It is only until now that the NY Times has deemed it worth their while to cover the Downing Street Memos, which even I covered here about a year ago — that’s right, a year ago. If you recall, these are the documents that high ranking British government officials prepared for Prime Minster Blair summarizing meetings between the Bush and Blair governments some eight months before the Iraqi invasion. The documents make it blatantly clear that the republican president, Bush, was ready to go to war (even though he publicly claimed the opposite):

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Read that again. Here’s a British government official telling Prime Minister Blair that the republican president was going to war, no matter what and that, in fact, the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invasion. Now, some simply interpret that as the Bush Administration placing an emphasis on evidence to support the invasion of Iraq. Of course, there’s another interpretation, a more sinister interpretation. And that’s that the republican president would go as far as fabricating evidence to invade Iraq. There’s certainly evidence to support the conclusion the Bush Administration would, in fact, fabricate evidence by provoking Iraq:

Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]".

Of course, am certainly not the only one that’s noticed the lack of coverage that this subject has received, in spite of the Downing Street Memos finally being written about in our so-called paper of record.

Peter Daou writes about the memo and how we, Liberals, simply lack the media organization to be able to make this a nationally talked about issue — similarly to how conservatives manage, on a regular basis, to inject their narratives into our national discourse. Daou points out that, unlike conservatives, Liberals simply lack what he calls the Media Triangle, that is: grassroots, politicians and media surrogates working in concert to affect the national discourse. The Liberal media triangle is broken, the grassroots is ineffective at affecting our elected politicians and there simply aren’t any influential, much less reliable, liberal voices in our mainstream media.

According to Daou, the Downing Street Memos story is the perfect sort of hook to build a narrative on, one that can cut to the heart of the thin national defense veneer that republicans still enjoy. However, until we figure out how to get the Liberal media triangle going, we’ll always be merely reacting to the conservative narratives that they tell us about ourselves.

Coulter: Stevens Should be Poisoned

Nice to see that our homegrown Taliban, the same group that now exerts so much influence over the one party that rules our country, is still hard at work trying to liberate patriotic Americans from the vise of those evil doers in the Supreme Court. According to some reports, Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor were threatened with assassination after some Republican officials subtly (and sometimes not subtly) suggested that violence against judges was understandable, and perhaps excusable. Of course, these Republican officials made those statements at around the time of the 2004 Presidential elections, and they knew that such red meat comments would go over well with the Republican right wing base.

Here’s what the AP writes:

WASHINGTON (March 16) – Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor have been the targets of death threats from the "irrational fringe" of society, people apparently spurred by Republican criticism of the high court.

Ginsburg revealed in a speech in South Africa last month that she and O’Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate "patriotic" killing of the justices.

[...]

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter joked earlier this year that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned. Over the past few months O’Connor has complained that criticism, mainly by Republicans, has threatened judicial independence to deal with difficult issues like gay marriage.

You gotta love how the so-called Liberal Media excuses their conservative darlings whenever they "joke" about killing a federal official. I mean, let’s say that Michael Moore joked about poisoning a Supreme Court Justice, do you think that the mainstream media would cuddle him like they still cuddle Coulter?

Hard to believe that the same woman that called for the killing of a Supreme Court Justice graced the cover of Time Magazine around this time last year — she’s certainly Ms. Right, and a great representative of everything that’s wrong with that other party and its supporters.

Update: AMERICAblog has a nice round up:

Delay threatens judges

And, let me repost something I wrote in March of last year:

Examples of religious right anti-judge hate speech:

Today, I received this email from the religious right propaganda organ AgapePress:

Judie Brown of the American Life League says the court-ordered starvation of the brain-injured Terri Schiavo is the latest evidence that liberal judges are trying to take on the role of God. "The problem with the court system is that they are moving closer and closer to condemning severely disabled Americans, as a group, to death," she says, "and that ought to frighten everyone."

Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., chief sponsor of the Federal Marriage Amendment:

"Our nation has a set of activist judges in Massachusetts and a rogue mayor in San Francisco. It is evident that they will openly aid and abet the homosexual lobby. These events over the past week clearly show that gay activists will skirt the law to create a new privilege that has never existed in this country."

Republican National Committee:

In an e-mail message, Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, confirmed that the party had sent the mailings. "When the Massachusetts Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage and people in other states realized they could be compelled to recognize those laws, same-sex marriage became an issue,” Ms. Iverson said. "These same activist judges also want to remove the words ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance.