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Fake Liberalism and the Threat of Cindy Sheehan On the drive home from a doctor appointment, I did it again: switched on AM radio. As a political blogger, it should not be surprising I listen and watch political commentary on the radio and television. But here in southern New Mexico, as in most of the rest of the country, the media outlets are glutted with Republican radio and television, so my choices are limited, if not completely constricted. So I listened to Rush Limbaugh, who comes off as a flaming liberal when compared to the guy who is on in the evening—Michael Weiner, who likes to call himself Savage. Predictably, Limbaugh was talking about Cindy Sheehan, the scourge-de-jure of far right Republicans. Said Limbaugh—and I paraphrase—Sheehan is basically a sock puppet for people who hate this country. I had a chuckle over that one. I sure the heck do not hate this country—as if one can truly hate everything about the country where he was born and lived his whole life—but I sure dislike the Limbaugh Republicans and the Savage fascists who dominate the airwaves and remarkably claim there is “liberal bias” in the corporate media. Once home, I of course flipped on the computer, checked the blog (moderated a couple dozen comments) and went about reading the news and commentary of the day. Cliff Kincaid and Roger Aronoff, on the National Ledger web site (naturally I read the far right fruitcakes as well as the “liberal” and “hate America” web sites and blogs), where banner ads featuring teenage girls in their underwear seem normal (semi-naked girls huckstering cell phones are a fad over there), are P.O.’d at the “liberal” media for paying attention to Cindy Sheehan. According to Kincaid and Aronoff, the Washington Post is an “anti-war” newspaper, a rather delusional assertion considering it was on of the last newspaper to come out against the Vietnam War. I guess Kincaid and Aronoff consider the Times “liberal” or “anti-war” because the newspaper has resisted any hostile take-over “bid” by the likes of Fox’s Rupert Murdoch. In fact, the Washington Post is “liberal” to a certain degree—that is to day neoliberal. “With a 21st-century perspective, where internationalism has become globalization, and monopoly capitalism is so powerful it no longer needs to mask its agenda with welfare programs, we can see the Establishment’s ‘liberalism’ for the ruthless neoliberalism it has always been,” writes Michael Hasty. “Yet the more powerful and elite the ruling class, the greater its need for an effective propaganda system to maintain that power; and the Washington Post remains, as writer Doug Henwood described it in 1990, ‘the establishment’s paper.’” It should also be noted that the Washington Post has a history of serving as a propaganda organ for the likes of the CIA and military intelligence—Philip Graham, who owned the paper after the Second World War, had been in military intelligence, and “Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence,” writes Hasty. “In a 1977 article in Rolling Stone magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward’s partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: ‘It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from.’ Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate domestic American media.” I guess, in Bushzarro world, the CIA is considered liberal, especially after it failed to go along with Dick Cheney and the Straussian neocons and clank out lie after outrageous lie about Saddam Hussein. Anyway, I find it refreshing (and entertaining) that paranoid neocon nut-jobs are all atwitter over Cindy Sheehan, showing their true colors by viciously slamming her and, by way of extension, her dead son. It is ridiculous to say the “anti-war” corporate media—an oxymoron if ever there was one—is on Cindy’s side. In fact, they are on the side of making a quick buck by exploiting whatever story comes along and the Cindy Sheehan story is a big one with plenty of potential for cash revenue—that is until the next Natalee Holloway story comes along. According to Kincaid and Aronoff, Cindy is a “hostage of far-left elements,” as if there is a McCarthy-like left-wing plot afoot in America, an absurdity to anybody who looks at the political situation in this country minus the ocular exercises of Bushzarro world. In fact, the far right views of Cliff Kincaid and Roger Aronoff are far more common than they would have us believe (rabid right-wing Republicans need to stop claiming they are underdogs, lest they become a laughingstock) and a few semi-liberal editorials on social issues in the New York Times make not a leftist conspiracy. As we know, in regard to foreign policy and Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, the corporate media is slavishly in step with the Bushcons and the radical right. Media corporations—hierarchical and basically authoritarian organisms—are incapable of sincere liberalism, even the faux liberalism preached by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean. |
