CommonPrejudice

Must Read

This perfectly sums up the enormous hypocrisy in American society. Really sad.

Acronyms

Greenwald has another excellent post up, this one on a U.S. senate committee hearing with the new attorney general, Michael Mukasey.

The Senators and Mukasey spoke all day long about torture with such dispassion that one would have thought it was nothing more than the latest bureaucratic HUD program. They don't even use the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" any more. That phrase has been so normalized that they now all know and use an abbreviation for it -- "EIT." So Senators ask questions about when "EITs" can be used and the Attorney General outlines the elusive formula he applies to determine its legality and all controversy, all passion, all intensity is completely drained out of the discussion in the U.S. Senate of our torture policies. "Torture" is now an EIT Unit.

So this is where it's heading, isn't it. Now euphemisms become acronyms of euphemisms. But then again, it's Super Bowl week and I hate to be downer. It's not like you or anyone you know is getting tortured or anything like that and it should be a good game. I like the Patriots to cover.

Must Read

Fantastic piece by Matt Taibbi. A couple of highlights:

... What we have to remember about America's half-baked propaganda machine is that, dumb as it is, it always keeps its eye on the ball. The war in Iraq is lost, everyone knows that, but there are future wars to think about. When a war goes wrong, the reason can never that the invasion was simply a bad, immoral decision, a hopelessly fucked-up idea that even a child could have seen through. No, we always have to make sure that the excuse for the next war is woven into the autopsy of the current military failure. That's why to this day we're still hearing about how Vietnam was lost because a) the media abandoned the war effort b) the peace movement undermined the national will and c) the public, and the Pentagon, misread the results of the Tet offensive, seeing defeat where there actually was a victory....

The notion that our problem in Iraq is a resource deficit is pure, unadulterated madness. Our enemies don't have airplanes or armor. They are fighting us with garage-door openers and fifty year-old artillery shells, sneaking around barefoot in the middle of the night around to plant roadside bombs. Anytime anyone dares oppose us in the daylight, we vaporize them practically from space using weapons that cost more than the annual budgets of most Arab countries to design. We outnumber the active combatants on the other side by at least five to one. This year, we will spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined -- more than six hundred billion dollars. And yet Tom Friedman thinks the problem in Iraq is that we ordinary Americans didn't tighten our belts enough to support the war effort.

Friedman should be hung upside down and have holes drilled in his skull for even suggesting this, of course. We're talking about one of the richest men in media, a guy who in recent years got still richer beating the drum for this war from his $9.3 million, 11,400 square-foot mansion in suburban Maryland. He is married to a shopping mall heiress worth nearly $3 billion; the Washingtonian says he is part of one of the 100 richest families in America. And yet he has the balls to turn around and tell us that the pointless, asinine war he cheerleaded for failed because we didn't sacrifice enough for it...

Yes, but usually the big media types are all about sacrifice.

Reality

As a report comes out from the Pentagon inspector general officially confirming what we have always known, that is the U.S. administration lied its way into Iraq, Tristero laments (to put it mildly) the path their country has taken.

... My God, people, we've had our country's government openly as well as secretly establish concentration camps all over the world; practice torture as an approved government policy; engaged in, and boasted about, international assasinations; destroyed through military action a foreign state merely because it could (and openly plan to do it again in the near future); undermined the integrity of the press by deliberately planting false stories and suborning journalists; been exposed as capable of using every tactic short of physical violence to prevent critics from publishing the truth; ignored the will of the American people, expert opinion, commonsense, and all common decency; advocated ever more bizarre theories of unlimited, unchecked power, and acted as if they were the law of the land ...

We are being ruled by psychopaths and fascists, not link cookers.

Hear, hear. And this doesn't even mention how they have ignored and lied about the biggest issue of our times, global climate change.

Typical

Two media posts to check out via the best media watchdogs out there; Mediamatters and Thinkprogress.

In a MediaMatters column by Eric Boehlert, Malkin and the rest of the warbloggers are once more exposed as the fascist children they are.

...warbloggers aren't interested in an honest, factual debate about a single instance of journalistic accountability. And they're not really interested in the specifics of the Burned Alive story. They're interested in wide-ranging conspiracy theories and silencing skeptical voices.

As American Prospect blogger Greg Sargent noted, "Malkin and her compadres are trying to accomplish one thing, and one thing only: They want to staunch the flow of images back to America of President Bush's disastrous war in Iraq." Indeed, censorship via intimidation -- not authentic media criticism -- has always been atop the warbloggers' agenda. (Their main beef with the press is that it exists.)

And Thinkprogress notes an absolutely scandalous about face by war criminal Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld recently:

... it is not a ‘war on terror.’ Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and (through) a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So ‘war on terror’ is a problem for me.

Just one example of Rumsfeld's prior 'war mongering':

[T]here has been comment in the press of late about whether or not we’re even engaged in a war on terror, or whether our purpose might be better explained in a different manner. Let there be no mistake, we are a nation at war, against terrorist enemies who are seeking our surrender or our retreat. It is a war.” [8/2/05]

They have no shame.

Quote of the Day (actually yesterday)

The Beltway pundit class and the premises which generate conventional Washington wisdom are corrupt to their core and always wrong.

This is from a fantastic post by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory on Russ Feingold and the incompetence of Washington media. I don't spend a whole lot of time watching cable news or mainstream punditry, mostly because it is far more frustrating than informative. The same applies to the regular columnists from most of the daily newspapers (I let other bloggers do the dirty work). But I do notice that when I do read an editorial or listen to a few moments of Chris Mathews, or Tim Russert or the Sunday morning crews I am always appalled at the misinformation, faulty logic and arrogance these people impart. And what's more, it becomes readily apparent in about 3 minutes of reading or watching. Yet these people earn million dollar salaries while wielding enormous influence over national and international discourse and public policy. (For example see this other post by Glenwald on how some ridiculous comment by James Carville has all of the sudden made Howard Dean's leadership of the Democratic Party an issue that is supposedly dividing Democrats) It truly stretches the imagination to wonder what would be necessary to change the prevailing media culture. If not for the good work done by bloggers (I mean the good ones, and of course this can, though most often doesn't, include conservative bloggers) who take fact-checking, logic, and common sense seriously it would be exceedingly difficult to stay informed and know who to trust in the MSM. There is precious little hope for the United States to maintain some semblance of democracy if the large corporatations who already overwhelmingly dominate the ownership of mainstream media outlets have their way and crush net neutrality. In this respect I think the election of a Democratic congress - for the time being anyway - will have very positive ramifications.

Certainly a bit of a rambling post but at least I occasionally can be optimistic about the return of the Democrats.

Once again..

Read Billmon.

A Sunday Read on Health Care

Very good comparison of American and Canadian health care by Sara at Orcinus.

Great Post by Digby

It you don't think this should be the result of this, then perhaps you yourself could use a visit to the Gitmo Inn.

Casual Friday

Tristero asks some tough questions.

...how does it feel to have George W. Bush, that paragon of moral probity, mental stability, and well-informed intelligence, granted the legal right to determine what is and isn't torture?

... What the hell is going on, that a country that prides itself on its heritage of freedom and liberty, that fought such an awful war over the degrading enslavement of human beings - that such a country would vote to permit some of the most repulsive and evil practices human beings are capable of and place the power to do so directly in the hands of a moral midget?

Ah what a downer that guy is. Best to just keep watching Deal or No Deal. ("heritage of freedom and liberty?" ... hasn't studied much Latin American history I'm guessing).