Baby Bradgelina

“You know…..people are just pieces of shit”

-Daniel DeFoe

The unrelenting stream of bullshit that passes for news in the sad cesspool of shame that is the mainstream media never ceases to simultaneously amaze and disgust me. The love child of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie has dominated coverage over the weekend along with the tragic although all too predictable cacaphony over the latest and greatest natural disaster, this time a massive earthquake in Indonesia that killed at least 4,300 people, mainly peasants living in poorly constructed dwellings. Next to the toxic allure of celebrity, sleazy perversion, tales of wonder from the animal kingdom, child murderers and work related accidents involving miners of some sort there is nothing that gets the MSM’s panties in a bunch quicker than a good old natural disaster. The advertising gurus and network bean counters are already in the pre-planning stages of how to descend like a plague of locusts upon whichever coastal U.S. city happens to be devastated by one of the several massive hurricanes predicted to make landfall this season and any other catastrophe such as the Java quake represents both a bonus as well as a warm up drill. The cable news networks will undoubtedly swamp viewers in saturation coverage whenever a killer storm threatens Miami, Tampa, Galveston or even poor New Orleans again. The hacks who masquerade as journalists will seize upon the opportunity to grasp for the brass ring in search of instant stardom ala Anderson Cooper, the charlatan politicians will seek to posture and promote themselves while keeping a safe distance from any actual involvement in the human misery and the corporate vultures like Haliburton, Blackwater and Dyncorp will be awarded reconstruction contacts through a no bid spoils system and then bring in the same illegal immigrants to perform the work on the cheap while shafting the displaced in the immediate area.

What the mainstream media should be covering instead of panting and salivating over Baby Bradjelina is the horrible atrocity of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha but the craven editors and owners of state run McNews conglomerates don’t want to taint Memorial Day weekend with any such unpatriotic stories, never mind that every day that the Bush administration is left unchecked to continue the massive assault on American civil liberties, the destruction of the working class and allowed to remain bent on instigating a disastrous global conflict is tantamount to pissing on the graves of all those poor bastards who died in any of this nation’s foreign wars to preserve liberty only to see it surrendered with nary a whimper from the childlike cretins of the second generation of television babies. The media should be covering Friday’s closed-door session where Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and FBI Director Robert Mueller urged telecom execs to secretively keep records on all internet activity under the premise of a crackdown on child pornography. CNET news is the only place where I saw this truly important story that has successfully used the cloaking device of full spectrum corporate media dominance to fly under the radar of the public at large. Neither the Washington Post, the major television news networks or the damned liberal New York Times saw fit to cover it although they all swooned over the birth of Baby Bradjelina, all that was missing were their presentation of gifts of gold, frankincense and muir.

Truth Is Heresy: When the MSM is not exalting in the birth of Baby Bradjelina it is working on the behalf of the corporatist state in trashing and denigrating Al Gore’s hard hitting new movie on global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. In the tried and true method of muddying the waters and therefore denying the legitimacy of the debate industry front groups and their well placed and likely well compensated insiders and editorialists have combined to make snide remarks like the following by the notoriously biased Gregg EasterbrookL

“Gore says that the entire Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could melt rapidly, the film then jumps to animation of Manhattan flooded. Well, all that ice might melt really fast, and a UFO might land in London too.”

 

Easterbrook is a longtime anti-environmental flack whose latest piece of asswipe destined for the bargain bin at your local Christian Nazi bookstore The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse features a cover shot of a glass of liquid that is dare it say it..half empty as an evocation of that famous Dale Carnegie style rhetorical question that is selectively used to judge whether a person is an optimist (Pollyanna) or a pessimist (realist) and therefore allow for the ostracism and marginalizing of any individual who dares to penetrate the sunny façade of ‘the power of positive’ thinking with the bummer of reality. This is a common problem in America society, specifically in the corporate environment and dare I sound pessimistic any society where telling the truth becomes a reason for being stigmatized is terminally fucked and destined for doom.

Harper’s Harping: No matter that our domestic manufacturing base is pretty much kaput and we have become addicted to the massive trade imbalances caused by the importation of cheap sweat shop goods that goose bottom lines in an appeasement to the temples of greed on Wall Street we have found an export commodity that seems to have the enduring potential of becoming the next great fad: fascism! Recently elected Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a right-winger determined to take down progressive society north of the U.S. border has played the George W. Bush card and began throwing the standard conservative hissy fit about the damned liberal media aka those who are trying to do their jobs by telling the truth. After reporters up and walked out of a recent press conference after Herr Harper refused to answer any questions he whined:

“Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view that they are going to be the opposition to the government” 

Then he refused to talk to them at all in the future and conjured up the good ole bias bogeyman.. now where have I heard that one before? Maybe Scotty McClellan would be open to act as Harper’s proxy now that the professional liar is out of work and looking for a new gig. And as far as Canada being a refuge for Americans looking to escape from the fascist menace by fleeing north it now appears that the most viable alternative is in Central and South America so this is as good a time as any to enroll in Spanish.

Yellow Jew Badges in Iran = Journalism as Yellow as it Gets

Iran Jew Badges=Black Propaganda

The drumbeat of anti-Iranian propaganda rolls on with of course more inflammatory Jew bashing attributed to the regime of president Machmood Ahmadinejad. This time a false and extremely scurrilous story has been making the rounds in the blogosphere and right-wing websites and even receiving editorial placement in some papers by staffers with dubious intent and an obvious ideological agenda. The story states that the Iranian parliament, at the command of Ahmadinejad has recently passed a law requiring Jews and “other religious minorities” aka fundamentalist Christians to begin to wear colored strips of cloth on their clothing as a form of indentifying themselves. Shades of the Third Reich, the story practically screams Holocaust and all that is missing are the concentrations camps. The covert operation to transform the Iranian hardliner into the newest version of the ‘New Hitler’ is as the think tank phrase goes “picking up steam” and now that Saddam Hussein has been dispatched somebody has to take the place of the modern incarnation of Der Fuehrer and expecting the MSM to pin the label on George W. Bush is as realistic of expecting Joseph Goebbels to call Onka Dolph ‘The New Satan’.

My local newspaper which long had been independent, a rare and vanishing breed in the days of media consolidation, corporate greed, yellow journalism, government propaganda disguised as news and sensationalism that belongs in checkout stand tabloids has slowly been taken over by the disease of newsless news and unsubstantiated conjecture through a losing battle of attrition given retirements and reassignments of key members of the editorial and news staffs. Yesterday morning it has officially joined the club of state run corporate press propaganda organs when a prominently placed editorial ran comparing the recent allegations on Iranian anti-Semitism to what else, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust while referring to the story on the mandatory wearing of badges as an identifier. This is entirely consistent with the anti-Israel message that is being attached to Iran and it’s democratically elected president, the U.S. media takes quotes out of context and hypes any insinuation that Iran has declared that the state of Israel is an enemy as if that comes as any big surprise when it comes to any other country in the Middle East…they ALL hate Israel ! The cynical choice to callously and shamefully exploit the Holocaust to further foreign policy initiatives shows an amazing lack of regard to the true victims of anti-Semitism which thanks to Bush’s war is enjoying a resurgence everywhere and dishoners the memory of the millions of Jews who were murdered by Hitler’s Nazi regime.

The fact of the matter is that the story is such an obvious piece of black propaganda (along the same lines as the ‘babies in incubators’ yarn back in the leadup to the first Gulf War) that most mainstream news outlets (other than the usual sensationalism driven cable channels like FOX) found it to be so problematic and riddled with red flags that they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Rupert Murdoch’s Newsmax and The Drudge Report were on it like flies lighting on dogshit though and the reactionary right wing hate bloggers were pounding their keyboards with a frenzy usually reserved for pounding their puds over pictures of Ann Coulter to disseminate this story that was nearly immediately debunked. The original source, The National Post of Canada was rapidly backing away from the story as though it were an unexpectedly encountered rattlesnake on a nature trail.

There has been an onslaught of attempts to paint Ahmadinejad as a dangerous anti-Semite who is on a divine mission to ensure the destruction of the state of Israel for months now which of course could be expected given the neocon alliance with hard core elements within the Israeli government who want to see Iran eradicated and are all too willing to trade in the currency of the Holocaust for their own nefarious purposes by exploiting American sympathy and guilt in order to bolster public support for another bloody, ruinous foreign misadventure that Bush in his messianic mindset and the influential support of a Christian Zionist base of fundamentalist loonies bent on inciting a nuclear conflagration and therefore kicking off the events leading to the absurdity that is the Rapture will buy into it and nuke Tehran.

I was so pissed off that I did a rare thing, I wrote a scathing letter to the editor of my local paper, not that it will likely see the light of day, the bastards don’t like to be called on their bullshit especially when it was their lead editorial despite the story not appearing elsewhere in the paper. It reeks of the activity of an inside operative on their editorial board and conjures up comparisons with the infamous Operation Mockingbird where the CIA utilized paid plants throughout the domestic press to disseminate agency propaganda. There was an excellent story done back in 1977 by Carl Bernstein the Washington Post Watergate reporter who didn’t sell out. This is hard to find anywhere so hopefully the following link works, it did yesterday but you know how it goes with the creeping censorship of the internet:

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

I am even more pissed right now due to the double dipping, first my tax dollars are used to finance covert propaganda and then I have to pay to read it through subscribing to my newspaper. Nice Racket!

Incidentally, the incessant lying, the court packing, the NSA being used to spy on journalists and just all of the creeping fucking fascism that we are having rammed down our throats by Bush’s jackbooted thugs also pisses me off.

But of course I am in the minority in a nation of sheeplike drones.

And besides, even if the story had contained more truthfulness than disinformation regarding the Iranian parliament passing such a bigoted and hateful measure wouldn’t the act be at least somewhat morally equivalent to those of our own domestic demagogues in congress who are seeking to defile our constitution with discriminatory amendments targeting taxpaying American citizens based on a deep seated loathing of their lifestyle?