“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”
— Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
At a February 13 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing to question newly appointed Special Representative for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, on United States policy toward that country, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) impugned Mr. Abrams’s veracity since he is a known liar who narrowly escaped felony perjury charges in 1991 by cooperating with Iran-Contra Affair Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. Mr. Abrams took exception to Ms. Omar’s statement. She went on to outline his participation in war crimes and meddling in the internal affairs of several Latin American countries, all while serving as the Reagan administration’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, an Orwellian title for someone who demonstrated contempt for human rights if they got in the way of his neo-conservative anti communist dogma.
None of the activities and attitudes Representative Omar outlined as pertaining to Mr. Abrams are in dispute, yet in the February 13 public hearing he didn’t want to own up to them. Elliott Abrams has been the point man for dirty work abroad for Republican administrations for nearly 40 years, and yet he expects American citizens and the people of the world to believe he has performed his services only for democracy and for human rights. When someone points out publicly how his record has demonstrated the exact opposite, Mr. Abrams gets testy, even nasty. Apparently his narcissism doesn’t allow for anyone calling him out as the nasty person he truly is, though it’s interesting that in his reaction he confirms it.
Everyone around the world must know, and the Venezuelans in particular must realize, that since the current presidential administration has assigned Elliott Abrams to the case in Venezuela that country is now in for a nasty, horrific time at the hands of the new envoy. It is as if a hockey team has sent in its most egregious enforcer off the bench. With Mr. Abrams on the job, Venezuelan oil will soon be back within the control of big American and European fossil fuel companies and the international banks will be able to squeeze indebted Venezuela dry, and that’s the endgame of the whole regime change charade and manufactured humanitarian crisis of aid supplies rotting at the Venezuelan border. The only ones who don’t know this, or pretend not know, are corporate media outlets and the consumers who uncritically suck at the corporate media teats of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and major newspaper and radio outlets. Slap a patina of democracy and humanitarianism on it, no matter how flimsy, and the American public will largely stand up and salute it, no questions asked, lest they be branded unpatriotic. It worked in 2003 for the Iraq invasion and has worked innumerable times before.
And it’s a tactic which has always worked wonders for Elliott Abrams in his career of promoting democracy and humanitarianism, while only incidentally serving corporate and government interests, which are the same thing. What a great guy! Anyone who believes otherwise is unpatriotic, and possibly a communist. A reasonable person might question why the despicable Mr. Abrams is representing the United States abroad in any capacity at all rather than lying low in shame, if not in jail, but then to stay sane a reasonable person had best give up such honest questions in today’s America.
A scene from the 1984 film Dune, directed by David Lynch, with José Ferrer as the Emperor, Siân Phillips as the Reverend Mother Gaius, Kenneth McMiIlan as the Baron, and Alicia Witt as Alia. Warning: gruesome images.
It wouldn’t be surprising news if the current administration resurrected for its damnable purposes Mr. Abrams’s fellow war criminals Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger. Now that’s a triumvirate of inglorious foreign policy pros to sicken the world! In their world it’s bad enough up is down, 2+2=5, and evil has the upper hand, but everyone is also expected by the current administration, its leaders and its followers, and even by the press, the so-called Fourth Estate for its purported independence from power, to not only swallow their hypocritical bilge, but attest to its toothsome flavor and heartily endorse it for others to swill in large doses. Here’s to you, Mr. Abrams!
— Ed.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicerresigned this week, originally stating his intent to stay on until August. Apparently new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci decided August was too long to wait for Spicer to leave and, as Spicer’s immediate boss, took the opportunity to name Spicer’s deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new press secretary, effective immediately. Mr. Spicer will most likely not be missed by anyone either inside the administration or in the press corps, though the satirists on the Saturday Night Live television show may miss him. They still have plenty of targets for satire in the current administration, starting with the Man with a Daily Message himself, the Tweeter-in-Chief.
The current administration has made no secret of its disdain for most of the press corps, certain favorites excluded, and may try to end daily briefings of White House reporters. It seems the briefings have been a White House ritual for so long that there was never a time they were not part of the scene. That is not the case. They are a fairly recent phenomenon in American history, and were not recognizable in their present form until the Eisenhower Administration. Even then the briefings were not conducted daily. It wasn’t until Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, was elected president at the end of the 1960s that press briefings became a daily occurrence. Nixon also had the Press Briefing Room moved to its current location in the West Wing when he ordered the indoor swimming pool covered over and converted to that purpose.
A 1970 caricature by Edmund S. Valtman of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was widely recognized as President Nixon’s “hatchet man” in dealing with the press.
Strange that President Nixon should have been the one to increase the frequency of press briefings, considering his often contentious relationship with the Fourth Estate. Nixon was not alone among presidents in feeling vilified by the press, and vilifying the press in turn. Most presidents have kept the press at arm’s length at best, viewing them as a necessary evil and trying when they could to control the tone and substance of their reporting about the administration. “Spin control” has always been a concern of presidents and their aides, though that particular phrase for it didn’t catch on until the Reagan Administration.
A scene from the 1983 film The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman, in which the 7 Mercury astronauts assert their priorities over those of NASA scientists by pointing out their leverage with the press.
Theodore Roosevelt was a rarity in that he cultivated a cordial relationship with the press, all the more to get them on his side when he used the Bully Pulpit to push his favored policies through Congress. His distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, went even further in developing good relations with the press, personally conducting twice weekly off the record briefings in the Oval Office. As briefings and presidential press conferences became more common through the twentieth century, people came to accept them as an indication of openness and a window into the executive branch, however distorted and murky the view might be. At least there was communication, and official positions could be known by the press and public.
Now this administration wants to pull down the shades on its workings. It makes no difference that Mr. Spicer is being replaced by Ms. Sanders. It hardly makes any difference that briefings are fewer and characterized by disrespect for the press, since this administration has demonstrated openly its contempt for norms of civil political discourse. When you know you will be lied to and treated shabbily, why stand there and continue to take it? Sooner or later, even the most profit hungry of the media outlets may abandon the White House press briefing as a source of anything other than insubstantial blathering worthwhile only as a target for satire. This administration may then find out, if the people in it are capable of learning anything at all, that if no one is taking seriously their side of any story or even listening, then there is no more spin control. With a little self control, the press may even stop giving undue attention to the daily distraction of outrageous tweets issuing from the Oval Office, and start paying attention to the important issues affecting this country.
― Vita
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink.’
― from 1984, by George Orwell.
The idea, so long promulgated that people have come to uncritically accept it as truth, of a “liberal media”, meaning by that the mainstream, corporate media, has never been more laughable than today. If people think corporate media outlets such as Cable News Network (CNN), Microsoft National Broadcasting Company (MSNBC), the New York Times, and the Washington Post, are “liberal” then perhaps their definition needs adjustment, because all of these media outlets are owned by giant corporations, and giant corporations are not known for liberal views.
Reproduction of a Charles Mills painting by the Detroit Publishing Company, depicting a young Benjamin Franklin (center) at work on a printing press.
What is more important with news is what is left out than what is left in and reported on. Those are the editorial decisions that filter down from corporate headquarters. Individual reporters may be to the left of Karl Marx, but it hardly matters if editors change their stories at the bidding of headquarters. What matters are the terms of debate, or what is open to question and what is not. Much of this is internalized by reporters eventually, or they don’t get to become editors. They have certainly learned and adopted as Gospel the rules of the game by the time they are ready to move up to senior staff.
But readers or viewers of the news never learn what has been left out by politic editors on behalf of their conservative corporate masters. Not every corporate master is conservative? Doubtful. Liberalism doesn’t go with that territory. Some astute members of the public may pick up the general drift of coverage from a particular outlet, but when it comes down to really important matters, they are addressed in nearly the same way by all the corporate media. It comes down to the narcissism of minor differences that Sigmund Freud pointed out when he wrote “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.” For the diversion of the masses, educated as well as uneducated, the pundits on television and in the op-ed pages of the newspapers dispute how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, while their corporate masters fleece everyone of every last dollar. It’s a neat trick.
All of that aside, it truly is a disgrace to see the open contempt the current presidential administration and it’s Republican allies around the country display for the Fourth Estate, the Free Press. The corporate, greed-based media, have brought some of this treatment upon themselves with their craven promotion of a shallow reality television star for president – what did they expect? – but what is truly unfortunate is how the disgraceful treatment coming from the White House press room has overflowed to independent news outlets that try to honestly hew to journalistic principles.
The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement”, an 1866 painting by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906).
There are questions to answer, however, before getting up in arms about the bad behavior of the current presidential administration in how it treats media it doesn’t like. First of all, the question of how the current crowd got into office can be bypassed. They are there now, and that’s that. The main question for now is: Who watches these television news shows uncritically and then counts themselves as informed? and Who reads these newspapers that have long since stopped being liberal in anything but stale reputation only, and thinks that they are caught up on the latest left of center take on important issues? Who are these delusional viewers and readers whose uncritical attention and financial support allows this charade to continue and thrive? Are they the ones who support a Free Press against an antagonistic, authoritarian regime in Washington, D.C.? Don’t bet your last corporate media stock share on it.
― Ed.
