Tuesday, February 05, 2013

THIS JUST IN! THE IMPLOSION!

BULLY BOY PRESS &  CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE

CONNIE FRIEDERSDORF IMPLODED TODAY.

IT WAS A SELF-IMPLOSION, HE THREW HIMSELF ON THE GRENADE.

YOU KNEW HE WAS OUT TO WHORE FROM THE START BUT THE FIRST CLUE WAS HIS LABELING GLENN-GLENN GREENWALD A "PROGRESSIVE."  GLENN-GLENN IS A RIGHT-WING LIBERTARIAN. HE IS ANTI-CHOICE, HE IS SEXIST AND HE'S A PRICK.

CONNIE TRIED TO PRETEND THAT HE UNDERSTOOD THE PROBLEM WITH THE MEDIA AND ITS COVERAGE OF KILLER BARRY O.

CONNIE IS FULL OF S**T.

WE'VE EXPLAINED IT BEFORE FOR YEARS NOW.  IT'S THE SAME WHORING THEY DID WITH BULLY BOY BUSH.

THE PRESS IS ALWAYS TOO CRAVEN TO DO THEIR JOB, TOO MISTAKEN IN THINKING THEY ARE THE POWER STRUCTURE.

THEY IDENTIFY UP AND REFUSE TO COVER REALITY.

THE REPUBLICANS ARE OUT OF POWER SO MAINSTREAM WRITERS -- NOT JUST CRAZIES LIKE JANE MAYER -- WILL WRITE THAT REPUBLICANS ARE NUTS AND CRAZY.  AND THEY WILL STOP THOSE PIECES WHEN A REPUBLICAN ENTERS THE WHITE HOUSE AGAIN.

THEY HAVE NO ETHICS AND ARE JUST SUCK UPS.  CONNIE CONFUSES THE ISSUE BY TALKING "RIGHT" AND "LEFT" MEDIA.  HE'S INTENTIONALLY BEING STUPID.  THE MEDIA EXISTS THESE DAYS ONLY TO LICK THE BOOTS OF THE POWERFUL.

CONNIE'S DOING HIS OWN SUCKING.  WHICH IS A REAL SHAME.


 FROM THE TCI WIRE:



Starting off with the roots of the illegal war.

Spin
In the place of real reporting.
Mushy soft focus moments
Not The Way It Was.

Unasked questions
Of the facts that are well known.
Facts that never will be buried
Of The Way It Was.

Can it be that spin can triumph fact
If we carefully rewrite each line.
If he had the choice to do it all again
He would -- he could.

Spin
May be full of lies and yet
If we push hard enough
Others will simply forget.

So it's the spin
We will hold onto
Whenever we discuss
The Way It Was.
The Way It Was.

In September 2005, Colin Powell took to 20/20 and mother confessor Barbara Walters in an attempt to improve his public image.  It was pure garbage and Ava and I documented that in "TV Review: Barbara and Colin remake The Way We Were."  That Colin Powell lied was not in doubt.  It's why he took to acknowledging a "blot" on his record and going so far as to admit that his statements were wrong.  They weren't just wrong, they were lies.  He went before the United Nations February 5, 2003 and made the case for war and he lied over and over and over.  In September 2005, with the Iraq War having proven to be a disaster, with Cindy Sheehan shining a light on the realities of the illegal war and the mood in the country firmly against the war, Colin decided it was time to pretend he was told wrong because he felt "fool" was a better image than "liar."

But Colin Powell lied.  He knew he was lying.  He knew why he was lying.  As Dick Cheney told him, he was the most believable (at that point) in the administration.  Only Colin could make the case for illegal war and impress the press. He lied and knew he was lying.  July 15, 2004, Greg Miller (Los Angeles Times) reported:

Days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was to present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released last week.
Two memos included with the Senate report listed objections that State Department experts lodged as they reviewed successive drafts of the Powell speech. Although many of the claims considered inflated or unsupported were removed through painstaking debate by Powell and intelligence officials, the speech he ultimately presented contained material that was in dispute among State Department experts.
[. . .]In their critique, State Department analysts repeatedly warned that Powell was being put in the position of drawing the most sinister conclusions from satellite images, communications intercepts and human intelligence reports that had alternative, less-incriminating explanations.
In one section that remained in the speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site.
"We caution," State Department analysts wrote, "that Iraq has given ... what may be a plausible account for this activity -- that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives."
The presence of a water truck "is common in such an event," they concluded.

Why are we having to go after all this garbage again?

In 1987, No Way Out made Kevin Costner a star.  Brian De Palma's The Untouchables had already made him a leading man that year but to become a star, you really do have to be f**kable.  No Way Out presented Costner as f**kable.  It also featured a curious subplot that Gene Hackman and Will Patton acted out.  Hackman plays Secretary of Defense, Patton plays his General Counsel Scott Pritchard. And Hackman is out of control and doing illegal things and Patton protects him over and over, cleans up the mess over and over (at the very end you learn Patton is in love with Hackman and that they probably had a physical relationship).  Colin Powell has his own Scott Pritchard, Lawrence Wilkerson who was Colin's Chief of Staff when Colin was Secretary of State. 

After Powell declared his blot, the obsessive love slave Lawrence Wilkerson began making the rounds trying to spit polish his boss' tarnished image.  It was always laughable.  Norman Solomon (Cold Type) pointed out in November 2005, how ridiculous it was:
 
Rest assured that if the war had gone well by Washington's lights, we'd be hearing none of this from Powell's surrogate. The war has gone bad, from elite vantage points, not because of the official lies and the unrelenting carnage but because military victory has eluded the U.S. government in Iraq. And with President Bush's poll numbers tanking, and Dick Cheney's even worse, it's time for some "moderate" sharks to carefully circle for some score-settling and preening.
 

But Wilkerson's been allowed to whore and whore by a number of people who have no ethics.  Ray McGovern is the latest to step forward and embrace Powell (to the point on penetration?  Is McGovern the "honey pot" he accused two women of being?).  We need to ask again, who the hell let CIA McGovern into the left?  He's gone on KPFA, KPFK and WBAI to attack two women who may have been raped and, in the process, made comments about Vietnam that a lefty wouldn't make.  Who the hell brought him over to the left?  Today he takes Larry Wilkerson at face value (yet again, Larry gives Ray a facial) and makes the case for Colin being tricked and not a liar.  Ray's crap first appeared -- where else -- at Robert Parry's Consortium News.  Robert Parry went nuts long ago.  His image will never be repaired.  But once upon a time, when he still lived in the real world, he co-wrote articles with Norman Solomon and he was familiar with Ron Kovic.  Ron Kovic knows the truth about liar Colin Powell and has told it now for decades.  It has been published at Robert's site in the past but it wouldn't today because they've decided to get in bed with Colin's pal Larry. It's amazing how Larry has spun for eight years on behalf of Collie Powell and how people have allowed him to get away with it.

That's not just sloppy journalism, but it is that.  Ava and I cover TV at Third and we do that every week and treat everything the same -- meaning research, meaning telephone calls,meaning the basic work required.  When we took on Colin Powell in September 2005, we knew we'd have to watch his interview with Barbara Walters.  How could we write, report and analyze it without watching it?  "Journalist" Robert Parry did.  He used an ABC press release to write an article about it.  I think that goes to the ethics involved.  I don't believe that 20/20 segment was even 20 minutes long.  It aired on a Friday, we covered it two days later (Third publishes on Sunday).  Robert Parry covered it three days later (a Monday).  And wrote a lengthy article about it.  But never watched the interview.

The thing about not watching an interview is you miss when the subject is uncomfortable, you miss the hesitation, you miss the word stumbles.  You miss the tells, the signifiers.  By not watching, you're also dependent on someone else's 'facts' and 'interpretations' which may or may not be correct.  I don't know why someone would choose to write at length about an interview that aired on TV and was also streamable online without having watched it.  But when someone does that, I don't call them a "reporter" or a "journalist."  I think there's a basic level of work required to earn either of those titles.

I think the lack of standards at Consortium go a long way towards explaining how Ray McGovern ended up there as a columnist, how Lawrence Wilkerson ended up there and how useless the site has become. 

They're now engaging in revisionary tactics on the Iraq War.  They're trying to redeem a power broker who could have refused to offer false testimony to the UN, who could have stepped down as Secretary of State, who could have done any number of things.  We don't need revisionary tactics.  We need the truth.  It is clear that Constortium News and Ray McGovern are incapable of providing the truth -- or even basic facts.  If you dobut it, they're using their space not to call attention to what's happening to girls and women in Iraqi prisons (torture and rape), not to call attention to the ongoing protests in Iraq, not to call attention to the imprisonment of journalist Nadir Dendoune.  No, they're using their space to call for Colin Powell to be cleared of suspicion, to whitewash his image.  They could shine a spotlight on the people who need it but instead they suck up to the powerful and serve up revisionary history.  They've made themselves useless.

People died, people were injured.  Birth defects will continue for years now.  Iraq was turned into a land of widows and orphans but, by all means, let's all instead fret about Colin Powell who makes millions each year speaking at various 'inspirational' conventions and offering up 'motivational' talks when not churning out, via cut and paste, another 'book' he's 'co-authored.' There's a thing called perspective and anyone who believes Colin Powell suffers from the Iraq War needs to check themselves.  On this week's Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox, Cindy speaks with Michael Parenti (archives are here).

Michael Parenti: More than half of the people of Iraq are either dead or in exile or homeless or devastated in one way or another.  They have no communities left, they have no schools, they have no hospitals -- I mean, it's just horrible what's happened to Iraq --

Cindy Sheehan: -- and cancers and other diseases because of the poisons and the depleted uranium and birth defects in the children.

Michael Parenti:  That's right.  Yes.  And birth defects galore are coming -- just as the same things you still see in Vietnam.


Iraq wasn't their topic, but when it came up, Cindy Sheehan and Michael Parenti knew who the suffering was and who it wasn't. 



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