Media Pressure

The White House is trying to bring the hammer down on straying media. I guess Chris Matthews' defection was too much for them. Time to get NBC back in line. W3IAI has the skinny.

Update: 5/20/08

Deaf

Friday, 28 September 2007

"I got my hammer ringin', baby, but the nails ain't goin' down."
-- Bob Dylan

Hammerblows of truth keep falling on the Bush Regime's propaganda campaign for war against Iran, which has been built up out of allegations so specious and shoddy that they make the manifold deceits of the Attack Iraq carnival look like gospel truth. But far from doing any damage to the engine of death now rolling toward Persia, the hammers are not even being heard above the roar.

Of course, it is actually inaccurate to refer to the "Bush Regime's propaganda campaign." As we have noted here before, the Democratic-led Congress has already overwhelmingly swallowed the Bush case for war – the Senate even accepted the Regime's mendacious casus belli unanimously. And this week, the Democrats went even further in adopting aggression against Iran as their own cause, when a majority of them joined with the obedient goose-steppers of the GOP in support of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which effectively if not officially authorized military action against Iran by declaring the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a "foreign terrorist organization" and tying it to attacks on American soldiers in Iraq.

Continue reading Lost in the Roar at Empire Burlesque.

....or hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

The George W. Bogus Adminisration

Republicans and the Bush administration used a 'bogus' terror threat that raised specific fears of an attack on the Capitol to scare lawmakers into adopting a dramatic temporary expansion of the government's spy powers last month, a former top intelligence committee Democrat said Wednesday.

  Raw Story

And you know what? They'll fall for it every time.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Coalition of the Willy-Nilly

George Bush said in his speech that there are 36 nations with boots on the ground in Iraq.

One example from the president's list of 36 is Iceland which has sent a single public information officer to serve in the NATO mission in Baghdad. More robustly, Italy has 8 officers on the NTM-I mission in Baghdad, Portugal is considering sending "up to 10."

  TPM

If you take a look at the list we were provided [by the White House], by a National Security Council official, the first heading is "Countries with troops on ground in Iraq." Only 26 countries appear in that category. The remaining 10 countries are assigned to either United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq or to NATO Training NTM-I.

So by the President's own accounting, the math is wrong. As Spencer Ackerman points out, there are other problems with the numbers. Canada is listed, for example, among the 36, but it pulled out its one and only person in Iraq months ago.

  TPM

Albania [...] has just 120 soldiers there and Bulgaria has 150 non-combat troops in Iraq.

  Think Progress

New Zealand does contribute its own soldier -- that's soldier, singular -- to UNAMI.

  TPM Muckraker

Sigh.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Is the Post Playing Judy Miller?

The latest Washington Post story on Sunni fighters aligning with the US is full of information which could offer support for all sides of the argument about what's going on in the Sunni community.

[...]

But hold on. Did you catch the name of the young Anbar tough who is the chief informant for the article? Abu Lwat. That's kind of an odd nom d'guerre for a tough former insurgent. See, in Arabic, "Lwat" (اللواط) means "the practice of homosexuality" or, more specifically, sodomy. As a sharp-eyed friend of mine put it, "Either the toughs of Anbar have some sense of humor with their noms due guerre or a coded message is being sent to readers who know Arabic." So.... what exactly is this young Anbar tough, chatting to an American reporter about his alignment with the American military in an interview evidently arranged by the American military, signaling by identifying himself as - with apologies for the crudity here - "father of the fag"? Or, since the luti is the giver rather than the recipient, as it were, perhaps it is "father of the guy giving it to the Americans up their posteriors"? (*) Inquiring minds would like to know... and might also want to know what the military translators who presumably set up this interview were thinking.

  Abu Aardvark

Well, if they're having the Post on, it wouldn't be the first time by any means that an informant fed a reporter a load of bull.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Why Was Pat Tillman Killed?

Justin Raimondo has some interesting bits of information to think about when trying to answer that question. For one thing, Pat was supposedly a fan of Noam Chomsky and was to meet with the famous anti-war leftist when his tour of duty was over.

What We Need Is...

...new propaganda to catapult.

The Pentagon has just spent $400,000 of our money to get a marketing report from the RAND corporation on how to better "sell" the war in Iraq. As you well know, these days it's all about marketing the product.

Wasn't that what Romney was wanting to do if he gets elected?

I guess the magazine hasn't gone over so well.

Captured: The Missing Link

How convenient is this? While "debate" grows here in this country over whether al Qaeda in Iraq is the same as bin Laden's group, lo and behold! the US captures the missing link.

US forces have arrested a top Iraqi militant who acted as a link between Al-Qaeda's Iraqi offshoot and the global jihadist network's Saudi founder Osama bin Laden, the US military said Wednesday.

  Raw Story

2008

Fred Thompson fired up a convention of Young Republicans, claiming himself the "top target" of Hillary Clinton. (Thompson and Clinton are, I believe, the candidates we'll see on the 2008 ballot. It won't matter to me if I'm wrong, though, because what I'm most sure of at this point is that there won't be anyone worth voting for.)

"I'm getting tired of having to apologize for the United States of America around the world."

Is he getting tired of having to apologize because our current policies are wrong? No.

"I'm tired of other people's perceptions that we need to apologize."

The one issue it seemed he might have had a problem with is that it was recently revealed he'd lobbied Bush 41 on behalf of a pro-abortion group.

The abortion issue is essentially just an emotional smoke screen anyway, since no one with the chance of being president is going to actually make any real moves against it, and Thompson's response was typical GOP: deflection.

"I'd just say the flies get bigger in the summertime. I guess the flies are buzzing," said Thompson [...] He refused comment on whether he recalled doing the work.

[...]

"Whatever choice do we have? Mitt Romney has been on both sides of the issue," said Paul Boyd, 26, of Memphis, Tenn. "Rudy Giuliani is 100 percent pro-choice. John McCain, at least for the first four years of the Bush term, was against whatever the president was for. Everybody has their flaws."

Since this wasn't a Religious Right crowd, I'd say his handlers picked the right spot for his first speech after that information made the news. Get him out there immediately making a big positive splash to counter any negative effect of the pro-abortion revelation.

Kevin Fickert, a 22-year-old college student in Los Angeles who originally is from Massachusetts, said he liked Romney's leadership as governor but thinks Thompson has more appeal. "Thompson has this star power about him that I really like," Fickert said.

In a nutshell.

Twit Romney, in the meantime, thinks we should hire a marketing firm to sell ourselves in the Middle East.

"People will give up half a day's salary to get a Coca-Cola in some parts of the world. We market Coke well. We market McDonald's well. We market our rap music, our movies, our jeans," Romney said. "We market everything America sells brilliantly, but when it comes to marketing ourselves and what we stand for, we don't do a very good job of it."

Maybe we don't do it well enough, but if he thinks we haven't been doing it, he hasn't been paying attention.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Congress rushed to restore State Department public diplomacy funding slashed in the era of Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich. According to a September 2003 General Accounting Office report, public diplomacy monies for the Middle East have increased by 58 percent since 2001. The State Department hired former Madison Avenue executive Charlotte Beers (since departed) to design a comprehensive strategy for marketing the US in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and launched the Arabic-language Radio Sawa and the Farsi-language Radio Farda to beam American pop music and brief newscasts into Middle Eastern households.

According to long-standing theories in the field of public diplomacy, conflicts between the US and foreign countries can be greatly ameliorated if foreign populations can be made to see that Americans are people just like them.

  Middle East Report Online

Now that would be a hard sell even for people who have a clue.

"The Middle East is the Disneyland of sandsurfing."

Hi Magazine, launched by the State Department in 2003.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet. --Mark Twain

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

  ABC

Yeah, that might explain it. But then again, are we supposed to believe that even though they don't speak Arabic, they broadcast Arabic-language messages without finding out what they say? I don't think so.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Just Shakin' My Head in Wonder

A US military spokesman is praising the peaceful nature of Monday’s anti-US demonstration in Iraq.

Col Steven Boylan says Iraqis couldn't have done such a thing four years ago, under Saddam Hussein's regime.

  KWTX article