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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, July 15, 2005:
Since it seems as clear as anything in this affair that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent the day before Novak's column either, I think we can chalk this up to Joe Wilson's habitual disingenuousness. . .
Thank you, Glenn "Habitual Disingenuousness" Reynolds.
These falsehoods are never retracted because they are a critical part of the role they play.
This is of course one of the most frustrating aspects of political debate. Once you abandoned the idea that there is such a thing as reality, that can be examined independently of any personal opinions or emotional constructs, then there is no longer any reason for conversation.
There is a reason that our criminal justice system is so elaborate, with the right to the twelve different viewpoints a jury represents granted to defendants, and elaborate rules for what is and is not admissible as evidence. It's all based on the assumption that truth exists but is often difficult to ascertain.
Once truth has been abandoned, all thats left is noise. That the noise still has a sizable audience, is distressing but it's something we still have to deal with forcfully and continuously.
In part because of his well-founded assertion that she was covert. The only liars in this whole sorry affair were the right wing apologists for Bushco.
Thanks Glenn for reviewing their pompous and false assertions. No apologies or retractions will be forthcoming, however. In the authoritarian world that they inhabit, all that supports the Leader is justified. It does not matter what gets destroyed in the process.
"Tim at Balloon-Juice -- who last night said: "I could entertain myself for hours looking up the hair-singingly civil manner..."
Shouldn't that read "hair-singeingly," assuming he means something similar to scorchingly?
that appear in the wingnut-o-sphere. Count and report the corrected record in the columns. I will bet right now there will be not a one. The issue will be stuffed in the Memory Hole as if it never was, and the fact that Plame was "covert" will be dismissed as of no importance, being as that her husband is a Bad Man who Made Trouble -- and she got him the gig in Niger, anyway. Nyah, nyah.
On the other hand, it didn't help a bit that the Plame-Wilsons and the CIA played coy about her status, and Fitzgerald has taken how long to clearly state the obvious? Part of the reason the RWAs got away with their lies -- and they have, make no mistake -- was because the people who knew the truth wouldn't state it.
"Process" and "rules" somehow prevented them from countering the outright falsehoods being spread far and wide without challenge. Played right in to the Big Lie, didn't it?
Why would they let the lie proceed like that?
I can't think of literally anything - including the abandonment of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq - that better illustrates the Bush Administration's willful damaging of American national security than outing Valerie Plame. Doubtless many will now ask themselves why should they risk their lives for a government that will make no effort to protect them or their collegues from the dangers inherent in intelligence work?
This leaves a dangerously void of dedicated and competent intelligence professionals, leaving only partisan or incompetent hacks in their place. How is any President from here on to trust the quality or accuracy of the the intelligence they receive? How many real threats to our nation go uninvestigated or are missed entirely while chimeras of "the anti-war left" and the like receive all the attention?
Truly, a most tragic legacy the Bush Administration has left us to live with. Here's hoping our children survive it.
GG:
Many people who listen to right-wing commentators such as these get their "news" primarily, even exclusively, from these sources. And these sources, knowing that, routinely create their own self-affirming though wildly warped realities
I keep wondering when/how actual reality will become unavoidable for them, but I figure it will never happen until something their hero pundits say causes them to lose a lot of money (obviously losing face and credibility hasn't worked). Actually, the war has cost them a lot of money, they just don't know it yet.
In any other universe other than the one they occupy, outing a CIA agent would be considered traitorous. How they continue to justify that within their own minds, evidenced by the convoluted excuses you've printed here, will never cease to amaze me.
it would appear that the current strategy is to reasserrt the lie yet again...and again....and again.....
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/05/fitzgerald_plame_cia_director.html
Like the shape-shifting T-1000 cyborg of Terminator 2, Patrick Fitzgerald's claim that Valerie Plame was a covert agent, and that therefore Scooter Libby deserves a harsh sentence for supposedly outing her, not only won't die a proper death due to lack of proof, it keeps mutating into new forms. Of all the curious behavior associated with the Libby case, that of the CIA's director for the past one year, stahnds out for its puzzling obtuseness.
I strongly recommend that anyone who has not read "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky buy or borrow a copy.
An excerpt from the book is available at:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing the newsworthiness of the U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, I984, the media do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias.
The book was originally published in 1988. By substituting the word "antiterrorism" for "anticommunism" it is made current. The model as it is practiced by the beltway and the MSM works better today than it ever has. As other commenters on this forum have said it is a case of "old wine in new bottles."
Media consolidation in America when combined with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has contributed greatly to our current state of news media as propaganda.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
