Columnist – John Sammon Okay I’ll confess. I have to admit I laughed, I’m delighted, and I feel a grim sense of amusement at the government’s horrified, ballistic-angry response to the leak of classified materials by Wikileaks. Government bureaucrats are threatening prosecution, screaming this and that. God only knows what they intend to do to get even with the perpetrators of the leaks.
Let’s be fair, okay?
How am I supposed to feel? Joe Average. That’s me. And proud of it.
I know they say it’s an attack on America, and that it endangers our security and operatives overseas, and I’m willing to listen to that. But it’s also time you listen to me, all you government hacks.
The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution that said “WE THE PEOPLE,” which logically excluded women, blacks, Indians, Mexican-Americans and even poor white men. It should have been “WE THE WELL-TO-DO WHITE MEN.”
Most of the Founders also kept slaves. We the People?
You lied to me about the Vietnam War with the Pentagon Papers.
Nixon lied to me he wasn’t a crook.
Reagan lied in the Iran-Contra scheme by testifying in court, “I can’t remember.”
Clinton lied about Monica.
Bush and Cheney lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Obama is breaking his word on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
Why should I care that you’re angry about the American people finding out what you’ve been up to and doing in their name? You want a secret government, and you want to call it Democracy, and you want me to support it.
We had a military operation in Iraq called “Iraqi Freedom.” Freedom imposed at the point of a gun, installing a government the people there did not select. Even if we agree with the outcome, even if you like the war, can you with a straight face call that truly “freedom?”
Freedom, for who? In other words, when I want your opinion I’ll give it to ya.’
The myth likes to say that your vote on election day is very important. To a degree it is. You can vote for a bond issue for a library, for a local mayor’s race, even for governor or senator. But a large proportion of what goes on in this country is not influenced by your vote. At all.
For example, foreign policy is dictated by people you’ve never heard of, in secret. When they misbehave, you have no way of knowing it, but they get really angry if by some quirk you find out about it. Then they run to the courts and plead their case in the name of patriotism.
The World Bank meets in secret. Lobbyists and cartels and corporate technocrats and big banks and oil companies and all the rest continue to call the shots without the oversight of public scrutiny. The Lincoln Savings and Loan fiasco is another example. How ironic the bank was named after Abraham Lincoln, a man history has lauded for his honesty.
Government is like the tip of a figurative iceberg. Most of it is under the water and out of sight. Secretive people wouldn’t meet in secret if they didn’t have something to hide.
Since you guys like to be secretive, and get so angry when by some quirk the shoe is on the other foot, I’ll let you in on a little secret of my own. I’m secretly delighted by the leaks.
If somebody gets hurt because of information going out, I’m sorry. But in fairness, we’re all hurt from secret government at one time or another.
I have never been afraid of the truth. I don’t feel safer not knowing it.
All you government paper-shuffling secretive hacks out there in your windowless underground bunkers, you at least can appreciate honesty. You know what that is, right?
America is not really a Democracy. Or even a true Republic.
Republican Dirty Tricks: Once considered liberal and progressive, the Republican Party has been taken over by right-wing conservative con artists who lie, cheat and steal to gain and maintain power. From voter fraud and suppression to smear campaigns, personal attacks and media manipulation, they have been using the same strategies for more than a hundred years.
While Democratic Dirty Tricks prominently show up around FDR’s first election in ’32, Kennedy/Nixon (Chicago) in ’60 and Lyndon Johnson in ’64, these lead to The New Deal, Social Security and Civil Rights while Republican Dirty Tricks give us depressions, poverty and massive national debt.
Republicans know if most people vote, they would never win so they try to demoralize the Democratic base and suppress the vote as much as possible, they buy some people off with tax cuts and scare the rest into voting against their own interests and that’s how they win. It’s a divide and conquer strategy that has worked well and they refine and expand it every election year. [ READ MORE ]
Their mission isn’t to find the truth, but to plant the seed in viewers’ minds that maybe, just maybe, the President and the Attorney General are the same type of militants seen wielding a nightstick and repeatedly slurring whites on Fox News. As the Chicago Tribune‘s Clarence Page wrote, “Now the New Black Panthers are being used to vilify a black president as being soft on black racism. Coming soon, I am sure, to campaign attack ads near you.”
By Ari Rabin-Havt
A long line of inmates solemnly enters and exits a prison yard through a revolving door. As the lone black inmate reenters society, he peers into the camera with a menacing glance. He is the only inmate to do so.
The ad described above was created by George H.W. Bush’s campaign as part of a broad strategy to terrify America by, as psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen explains, playing on “fears of the dangerous, lawless, violent, dark black male.”
Roger Ailes‘ History of Race-Baiting Has Been Transformed into — Fox, A Racist, Biased, Extortionist Republican Political Operation.
[CLICK PLAYLIST FOR MENU]
While the most infamous Willie Horton ads were created by an independent organization, it was Bush’s media consultant Roger Ailes who “gleefully” told Time Magazine in August of 1988, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”
1988 wasn’t Ailes’ first experience dividing Americans along racial lines. During a taping of the “Man in the Arena” series in 1968, the Nixon campaign stumbled on a problem when a panelist they thought was a physician turned out to be a psychiatrist. Ailes quickly figured out a solution.
According to Rick Pearlstein’s “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America”, Ailes would substitute a “good, mean, Wallaceite cab-driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit in there and say, ‘Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?’” Pearlstein added that “Nixon then could abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a ‘moderate’ version of the opinion.”
Given his history, it should be no surprise Ailes’ minions at Fox News have obsessed over the discredited 18 month-old story of alleged voter intimidation by New Black Panther Party members on the day of the 2008 election. Since June 30, Fox News has spent over 8 hours of airtime and 95 segments on the story.
And no network has done more to expose Americans to the extreme and hateful politics of the New Black Panther Party, which has been designated a “hate
group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, than Fox, where the group’s spokespeople have appeared more than 50 times since 1998.
The truth is, it was President Bush’s Justice Department, not Obama’s, that made the decision not to pursue criminal charges against members of the New Black Panther Party for alleged voter intimidation at a Philadelphia polling center in 2008. In fact, the Obama administration successfully obtained default judgment against Samir Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party carrying a nightstick outside the polling center on Election Day.
Their mission isn’t to find the truth, but to plant the seed in viewers’ minds that maybe, just maybe, the President and the Attorney General are the same type of militants seen wielding a nightstick and repeatedly slurring whites on Fox News. As the Chicago Tribune‘s Clarence Page wrote, “Now the New Black Panthers are being used to vilify a black president as being soft on black racism. Coming soon, I am sure, to campaign attack ads near you.”
Roger Ailes and Fox News – along with the entire Republican Party – are praying the mainstream media will cave to right wing pressure and delve into this story. As the chief communications strategist for Republicans, Ailes couldn’t have scripted it better.
Russell King Exposes the Deep Swamp of Republican Hypocrisy and Explores How This Racist Party Has Alienated America
Dear Conservative Americans,
The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.
First, the invitation: Come back to us.
Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from yours; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.
Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples ? by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.
If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:
• You can’t flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same.
Bush Bowing Down To King Abdullah
Nixon.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower bowing to Charles Degualle in 1956.
You didn’t even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed leaders of a country that’s not on “kissing terms” with the US.
If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it’s 2004 or 2010. This is true, too, if you’re taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN. Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution. This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God’s stand, too.
When you chair the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you can’t send sexy emails to 16-year-old boys (illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well).
• You can’t praise the Congressional Budget Office when its analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it’s unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don’t.
• You can’t vote for X under a Republican president, then vote against X under a Democratic president. Either you support X or you don’t. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.
• You can’t demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don’t.
• You can’t whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s former leader admits you’ve been doing it for decades.
• call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, as “the end of representative government”;
•shout “baby killer” at a member of Congress on the floor of the House, especially one who so fought against abortion rights that he nearly killed health care reform (in fact, a little decorum, a little respect for our national institutions and the people and the values they represent, would be refreshing — cut out the shouting, theswearing and the obscenities);
• call a majority vote the “tyranny of the minority,” even if you meant to call it tyranny of the majority — it’s democracy, not tyranny;
• call the president’s support of a criminal trial for a terror suspect“treasonous” (especially when supported the same thing when the president shared your party);
• You cant repeatedly assert that the president refuses to say the word “terrorism” or say we’re at war with terror when we have an awful lot of videotape showing him repeatedly assailing terrorism and using those exact words.
If you’re going to invoke the names of historical figures, it does not serve you well to whitewash them. Especially this one.
• You can’t say things that are simply and demonstrably false: health care reform will not push people out of their private insurance and into a government-run program; health care reform (which contains a good many of your ideas and very few from the Left) is a long way from “socialist utopia”; is not “reparations”; and does not create “death panels”.
• declare that those who disagree with them are shown by that disagreement to be not just “Marxist radicals” but also monsters and a deadly disease killing the nation (this would fit in the hyperbole and history categories, too);
• call people racists without producing a shred of evidence that they said or done something that would even smell like racism — same for invoking racially charged “dog whistle” words (repeatedly);
So, dear conservatives, get to work. Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the bald-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred. Then offer us a calm, responsible, grownup agenda based on your values and your vision for America. We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we’ll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream with open arms. We need you.
About The Author: Russell King — Read more of Russell King’s fabulous work at Russ’ Filtered News.
Noam Chomsky on Tea-Party Protests: “It is very similar to late Weimar Germany.” “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.” “I listen to talk radio.” “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
By: Chris Hedges Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate.
Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates. When Christopher Hitchens decided to become a windup doll for the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, one of the first things he did was write a vicious article attacking Chomsky. Hitchens, unlike most of those he served, knew which intellectual in America mattered. [Editor's note:To see some of the articles in the 2001 exchanges between Hitchens and Chomsky, clickhere, here, here and here.]
“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky said. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”
Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.
“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”
“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”
“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”
Chomsky’s courage to speak on behalf of those, such as the Palestinians, whose suffering is often minimized or ignored in mass culture, holds up the possibility of the moral life. And, perhaps even more than his scholarship, his example of intellectual and moral independence sustains all who defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.
“I cannot tell you how many people, myself included, and this is not hyperbole, whose lives were changed by him,” said Finkelstein, who has been driven out of several university posts for his intellectual courage and independence. “Were it not for Chomsky I would have long ago succumbed. I was beaten and battered in my professional life. It was only the knowledge that one of the greatest minds in human history has faith in me that compensates for this constant, relentless and vicious battering. There are many people who are considered nonentities, the so-called little people of this world, who suddenly get an e-mail from Noam Chomsky. It breathes new life into you. Chomsky has stirred many, many people to realize a level of their potential that would forever been lost.”
Okay I’ll confess. I have to admit I laughed, I’m delighted, and I feel a grim sense of amusement at the government’s horrified, ballistic-angry response to the leak of classified materials by Wikileaks. Government bureaucrats are threatening prosecution, screaming this and that. God only knows what they intend to do to get even with the perpetrators of the leaks. 
, Ailes would substitute a “good, mean, Wallaceite cab-driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit in there and say, ‘Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?’” Pearlstein added that “Nixon then could abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a ‘moderate’ version of the opinion.”
