Thanks to Mr. Greenwald for "Fisking the NYT" as Andrew Sullivan put it. Perhaps if enough of us pay attention for long enough, we'll learn to do it ourselves. (Though over at FireDogLake the winning entry for a title for a Bush Bio was "You Can Fool Enough of the People Some of the Time.")I get that the lessons to be learned here are 1)don't get sucked into empowering authority to do whatever it wants, and 2)speak up against revisionism where're you find it (assuming you are awake enought to recognize it). But it seems that for we, the people to not get fooled again the whole nature of our relationship to media is going to have to change. How is that to happen? Not everyone can spend hours a day sifting through the blogs.

Well said, Little Brother.

Your description of 'pragmatism' as one of a series of exit ramps that turn out to loop you back to the status quo is a neat encapsulation of the function of public discourse in in technological society (cf Jacques Ellul's work): to process the meme of 'participatory democracy' such that the few who can be bothered to participate feel they are meaningfully doing so, while the technological automaton systematically continues to reduce meaning to a set of economic transactions of production and consumption. The function of the head-of-state is simply to sell those meanings that have currently been shown to be what the system as a technological whole requires.

There is a sense in which the general theme of GG's UT may be read as the insistence that 'meaning' itself remain at human scale, for the use of humans in some wholistic sense, rather than simply a token to be manipulated for technical ends, whether those be the increase of market share for a particular MSM venue, or the compliance of the American people in government actions which render the meaning of words like 'law' and 'justice' into tropes for whatever it is those who are believed by all to have power decide to say these words mean.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, pointed out:

"As you are, so will you have leaders set over you."

(hadith of Baihaqi)

Applied to the Iraqis under Saddam, applies to us. There's a sense in which the horror we feel at the deep rot on display has a mirroring function.

Thank you for bringing this case to the attention of the readers.

for what it is worth: Can't recall if particular cases are mentioned, but Michael Scheuer mentions his role in creating rendition program under Clinton in _Marching Toward Hell: American and Islam after Iraq_.

Robert Fisk

The size of the readership that GG reaches daily may be small compared with say, the number who watch the Superbowl. But it is not insignificant...There is evidence that the best-read blogs reach audiences comparable to that of a mid-size city newspaper. But more importantly, many of the readers here blog themselves, so the ideas reach beyond the direct readership.

GG consistently reinforces a relatively small number of disproportionately important memes. The best chance for change comes from this kind of consistent, rhythmic reinforcement

...kind of like the vibrational harmonics than can bring a bridge down if it isn't engineered properly.