In the manner of lacing well water with poison, the Republican right has sought to use patriotism as a deadly sword against progressive Democrats.

The propaganda maneuver is based on a simple principle. Only the Republican right can define patriotism. As a result, the most reactionary Republicans engaging in the most odious conduct, including unconstitutional acts of war and corruption, are deemed patriotic.

Those attacking such individuals and their actions are ipso facto deemed unpatriotic and of engaging in conduct that “gives aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Many cite the mid-twentieth century conduct of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy as the opening salvo in the strategy to paint progressives unpatriotic, but the effort was launched when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt developed a coalition of union and middle class support based on strong federal action to counteract the tragedy and suffering incurred during the Great Depression.

A reactionary big business coalition called the American Liberty League strove so hard to bring FDR down that a Fascist coup was initiated that was brought down through the valiant effort of one of America’s unsung heroes, General Smedley Butler.

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Justin Elliott writes at TPM Muckraker Wednesday April 21, 2010:
Rent-A-Front: New Group Wages Stealth Battle Against Wall Street Reform

In the last few weeks, a new player entered the financial reform fray with a $1.6 million ad buy, a respected economist on board, a blitz of opinion columns on left-leaning websites, and a message, cooked right into the group's name -- Stop Too Big To Fail -- that liberals could love.

But as TPMmuckraker has looked into the group, every indication is that Stop Too Big To Fail is an astroturf operation funded by corporate interests to give the appearance of grassroots opposition to reform.

The group's leader has a long history running a rent-a-front operation: offering up his services to large corporations who are willing to pay top dollar for a "consumers group" that will engage in stealth advocacy on behalf of industry. The group refuses to divulge its funding sources. The respected economist whose support the group touts now says he was deceived. And Stop Too Big To Fail has links to DCI Group, one of Washington's best-known astroturf operators.

Besides all that, Stop Too Big To Fail's real goal is clear: kill the financial reform bill.

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By David Swanson

ACORN is shutting down because of a fraudulent video pimped by the corporate media. U.S. forces in Afghanistan have heroically laid seige to and conquered a fictional city, helping build the case for further escalation. A cable news channel has created a right-wing mass movement by pretending it already existed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich voted for a health insurance bill he believed would deprive more people of healthcare (and wealth and homes), because fraudulent reports had convinced his constituents of the opposite. The peace movement was defunded in November 2008, because of a fraudulent presidential election campaign. 71% of Americans believe Iran has nuclear weapons. 41% of Americans think the quality of the environment is improving. Has the power of the corporate media to overwhelm all before it begun to sink in yet?

ACORN's funders didn't have to run and hide because of a bunch of laughably bad lies, but they were afraid. The most common excuse of progressive congress members for anything they do is fear of the media. The peace movement didn't have to shut down, but its funders had used war as a criticism of Republicans; opposing war for its own sake was secondary, and their televisions told them peace had arrived. Kucinich could have stuck to his No vote on healthcare, but he probably wouldn't have lasted long in Congress. We don't have to be suckered by comically manipulative war news, but all the big media outlets want war -- and the Democratic-party outlets especially favor war now. Fox News could not have created the Teabaggers on its own, but MSNBC and the Democratic blogosphere spend a majority of their time focused on Teabaggers and Republicans because it unites their viewers/readers against something uglier than elected Democrats, never mind that in Washington the Democrats technically have all the power.

We need independent media. Is that not yet crystal clear?

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With Rush Limbaugh’s latest full court press against Barack Obama he has, among other things, sought to link Obama’s effort to pass a health care bill with Nazism.

This is dangerous ground for Limbaugh since analysis of Nazi practices, particularly in the realms of propaganda and economics, reveal much more in the way of commonality with the loquacious talk show host than with Barack Obama.

On the subject of propaganda, look at what Limbaugh has been up to the last few days. He has been referring to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as imams and mullahs.

Now just what does that translate into? Race hate against Arabs. He is using a blanket charge of racism against the Arab community and then linking the House and Senate Democratic Party leaders to terrorism through trying to domineer the legislative process in a dictatorial manner.

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Hold Onto Your Underwear
This Is Not a National Emergency

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI.  In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire.  More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported.  In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died.  In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226.  Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006.  And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued.  In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport.  (No one was killed.)    

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"It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever."
--Eugene Jarecki
Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki's shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.

He may have been the ultimate icon of 1950s conformity and postwar complacency, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was an iconoclast, visionary, and the Cassandra of the New World Order. Upon departing his presidency, Eisenhower issued a stern, cogent warning about the burgeoning "military industrial complex," foretelling with ominous clarity the state of the world in 2004 with its incestuous entanglement of political, corporate, and Defense Department interests.

"Why We Fight"
99 minutes

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A military affairs blogger has posted a bit of media research with some rather, shall we say, unlikely(?) results, RawStory reported Friday.

It seems that for at least this year, and probably for a few years previously, the Taliban have been playing their assigned role in the great war on terror to the letter and have been considerate enough to stand around in standardized production groups to be attacked and killed by unmanned aerial drones and US and Afghan ground troops.

Groups of not odd numbers like 29 or even 31 of them, but standing there waiting for their martyrization in groups of exactly 30.

Citing the Moon of Alabama blog, which made a similar argument this spring, Security Crank linked to 12 news reports of separate air strike incidents since the start of the year in which the number of Taliban or insurgent casualties was reported to be 30, in most cases citing US military officials.

Not 29, not 31. Thirty.

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On September 11, 2001, my office building, the World Trade Center, was attacked by al Qaeda, a murder cult of Saudi Arabians, funded by Saudi Arabians. And so, in response to the Saudis’ attack, America invaded … Afghanistan.

And here we go again. The New York Times (print edition) headline last Friday was: “Pakistani Army, In Its Campaign In Taliban Stronghold, Finds A Hint Of 9/11.”

Google it and you’ll find the Times report repeated and amplified 5,785 times more.

Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

Your eyelids are getting heavy. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

It’s the latest hit from the same crew that brought you Saddam = 9/11 and its twin chant, Saddam = WMD, Dick Cheney’s chimerical tropes which the New York Times’ Judith Miller happily channeled to the paper’s front page.

And they’re at it again.

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In the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion any good journalist on the day Powell told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction would have been able to debunk Powell's claims the same day.

Former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter spoke in Tokyo the same day Powell made his presentation at the UN and told the Foreign Press Association of Japan that everything Powell had said that day in the UN was a lie, and it later turned out that Ritter was right. Ritter's speech that day was covered by Associated Press (AP) on video and wire services.

Every news organization in the world got Ritter's speech via AP, and virtually none of them published it. Rather the world press simply let Powell get away with his lies that helped lead to an illegal invasion that by some counts resulted in over a million Iraqi deaths, along with the more than 4000 US Troop deaths and tens of thousands of US Troop maimings.

Ritter is now making similar warnings about the drumbeats for war with Iran and debunking the false claims that Iran is well on the way to producing a nuclear bomb, which by the way if Iran did produce and use against Israel would likely immediately result in Iran's total destruction by Israel with their stockpile of by some counts 200 or more nuclear weapons.

We are being asked by a US Administration, Military Industrial Complex, and world press propaganda campaign, to believe that Iran is suicidal as a justification for attacking them.


Real News Network - October 6, 2009
Ritter on Iran
Scott Ritter challenges idea that Iran is close to producing a nuclear weapon

How American Public Discourse Is Manipulated Through Fear & Ignorance

The current debate about national health care is the most recent example of how savvy special interest groups will leverage base human emotions to sway public opinion, as opposed to engaging in honest, rational discussion. This tactic is as old as human life on this planet, hearkening back to parents warning children of the Bogeyman hiding under the bed.

That the tactic continues to be used in the twentyfirst century is indicative of how malleable of a consuming public has been "bred" in this time of constant bombardment via media channels. Rather than promoting the virtues of education, intellectual challenge or human achievement in any realm other than celebrity or conspicuous consumption, contemporary Americans are being trained, or better yet, tamed to respond to shallow images delivered via multimedia, as much as Pavlov once conditioned dogs to respond to short stimuli.

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