These Phoney Broadcasts are Getting Tiresome

Always so, so timely.
Always right on cue.
Little boots is going to open his lying piehole tomorrow night at the monsters ball in Washington, and no doubt his speechwriters are including comments about the latest "Al Queda" threat that was broadcast by Al Jazeera today.



According to the AP "Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri said in a videotape aired Monday that
President Bush was a "butcher" and a "failure" because of a deadly U.S. airstrike in Pakistan targeting the bin Laden deputy, and he threatened a new attack on the United States."

Never mind that "Al Queda" always was and is a CIA asset.
Never mind that Al Jazeera is located in Qatar, whose emir subsidized the Arabic broadcast company. The same emir who hosts the sprawling Al Udeid Air Base
Never mind that these broadcasts couldn't be timed more conveniently by Karl Rove himself, and probably are.

I remember a shining example of this media management that happened back in the mid 80s. Back then the boogabooga du jour was the dire Nicaraguan threat to us all. Reagan and his cronies seemed to be obsessed with this tiny, impovershed central american country. (That it was the threat of a good example to it's neighbors is another story.)
The fascists needed to publicly give a shitload of money to the contras, a CIA terrorist mob that was used in a proxy war against the Nicaraguan people. A few days before the vote in congress, a story exploded in the media that Russia was sending mig 21s to the Sandanistas, complete with tv news bulletins. Congress authorized the money. The story was retracted a few days later on page 27.

The only thing the fascists have is fear. We're living in a shell of a country, with the government basically on the verge of financial collapse - U.S. IN TECHNICAL DEFAULT The fascists are trying to wage war on the world to expand the empire like a cancer while our country is rapidly being turned into a prison The whoring mass media is furiously at work to ensure that we stay in lock step behind this insanity, and the one tactic that's never failed to work is to generate a perpetual climate of fear.

What no one seemed to notice . . . was the ever widening gap. . . between the government and the people.

The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. . . . It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . . .

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that . . . one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. . . . You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. . . .

But the one great shocking occasion . . . never comes. . . . That’s the difficulty.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1938-45 University of Chicago Press, 1955