The Art of Noise

So it seems that a "journalist" from the Talon News Agency, one Jeff Gannon (not his real name), has been outed as a shill for the Bush White House. Evidently he has been given a daily pass for the past year into the exclusive club that has access to White House press briefings, without a shred of a true credential.

There he was at Bush's last press conference lobbing the softball "question"--"how are you going to work with these people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality", referring of course, to the opposition party, the hapless Democrats, (they are, it pains me to say, an easy target).

The "question" was nothing but a parroting of the RNC/WhiteHouse/Karl Rove party line. Media Matters for America has shown that "Gannon has served as a lifeline for White House press secretary Scott McClellan at press briefings and that Gannon copied GOP documents and releases verbatim and without attribution for use in his articles".

Gannon has since resigned from the Talon New Agency -- "Because of the attention being paid to me I find it is no longer possible to effectively be a reporter for Talon News."

Anyone smell a rat?

Has the story shown up in the "liberal" media? On Fox News? "Who's Looking Out For Us" O'Reilly? Not yet.

Just as odious:

From the February 7 edition of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer, (with the venomous Ann Coulter):

LAWRENCE KUDLOW (host): We got a couple of seconds before the break when you guys are all going to come back, but, Ann, I just want to give you first whack at this. Eason Jordan, top news executive at CNN -- I mean, to me, this is absolutely incredible -- this guy says at a big conference in Davos that the U.S. military is deliberately targeting and assassinating American journalists. Huh? He still has a job, huh? You got a take on that?

COULTER: Would that it were so!

KUDLOW: Would what were so?

COULTER: That the American military were targeting journalists.

KUDLOW: Oh, no! (Laughing) Don't go there.

A right wing commentator expressing delight at the prospect of American journalists being killed by the American military. Outrageous!?

Well, not really. Has the story shown up in the "liberal" media? On Fox News? Where's O'Reilly?

Where is O'Reilly?

He's busy making sure that Ward Churchill, the college professor who wrote an essay three-and-half years ago, doesn't have a pot to piss in. He's busy outing any administrator at any level of any institution that has the temerity to allow this "misguided" "America hater" a forum in which to express his "hate speech".

Such is the state of political discourse in this culture that a pie-eyed piper like O'Reilly can exhort his armchair minions into cyber-action, overwhelming some hapless third-tier administrator with threatening e-mails, in effect leading a cyber mob aginst the evildoers.

Why doesn't he mention the hateful musings of Ann Coulter? He 's the first out of the box when one of the "Hollywood elite" or the "left wing nuts" make a disparaging comment about Bush.

Why? For the same reason that Gannon will survive his exposure as a fraud. He will be lionized as a "victim" of the"liberal' "elite" media.

It's a cultural war, indeed, and the neocons have mastered the art of noise.

Woeful State

The state of the union seems to be dependent on the state of the 51st State, to the exclusion of all others. The fixation with Iraq is all that the hapless commander-in-chief has to hang his rather small sized hat on. Yet, for some peculiar reason, it continues to carry the day.

Freedom. Freedom. Freedom for the Iraqi people. Not a word about WMD, tons of bio-chemical weapons; "re-constituted" nuclear programs; mushroom clouds, etc. All of the fear-mongering blather of the winter of 2002-2003 is now lost, two long years later, in the bluster of the post -election promise of "freedom and Democracy". Not a word about bin Laden.

Two years ago we were hustled with "fear". Now we are being hustled with "the Iraqi people".

The lies and fabrications put forth with absolute conviction by Bush/Cheney/Rice/Wolfowitz have all but been forgotten. Critics are ridiculed, scorned and marginalized. The pundits gush. Bush is now King of the World from Fox to MSNBC, to CNN; the AM radio dial is nothing but an echo chamber for the RNC.

The exploitation of the fallen Sgt. Norwood by the draft-dodging coward at the podium was absolutely sickening. That his parents could stand there and applaud the craven liar who sent their son to a meaningless death was surreal. "Now it's my turn to protect you", Norwood wrote to his mother. From what? Who cares. It was, as Pat Buchanan said, "the show-stopping moment" of this year's state-of-the-union address. That's entertainment.

Bush stood there, earnestly smirking through the hugs and the tears, knowing full well that he had pulled off the coup of the millenium, forever frozen as a "media moment". That we are only five years into the current millenium makes the feat all that more impressive.