Letters to the Editor
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Don't shoot the messenger
Laughing and pointing at its exposed junk is not nearly as messy.
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@ shooter242
Oh, I'm sorry. You had no inkling that former Generals might be affiliated with the pentagon, or military industrial complex? Perhaps you thought they might be anti-war? The GENERALS? My, what a gentle soul, so innocent and naive.
I suppose it's understandable that you're unaware of it, given the kind of media behavior GG describes, but there are, in fact, retired generals and other high-ranking military officials who've opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq from the beginning.
But I doubt that the Pentagon -- or General Electric -- would approve of them being consulted by the media as "analysts".
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Friends in high places
What leaps out at me is Williams' description of his relationship with these ostensibly objective military analysts as "a close friendship with both men." Reminds me of the Libby trial where the "journalists" and the people they were supposed to be covering were all BFF. It's a little difficult, to put it mildly, to honestly scrutinize the actions and policies of people who are your close friends. That's why jounalists are expected -- among fair-minded folks -- to keep a professional distance from those in power, lest their integrity and credibilty be undermined. What's so hard to understand about this?
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It matters, BrewCity.
Do you seriously think anything will come of this? A few years ago I would have thought any one of these things would have taken this administration down. They have been and are probably going to get away without so much as a scratch.
It matters.
It was barely a generation ago that Jim Crow laws, lynching, and membership in the KKK were still considered 'acceptable'. No longer.
The generation before that, anti-semitism and racial segregation were considered 'acceptable' and even 'patriotic'. No longer.
Every generation has its trials as it tries to secure a saner future for the next. This is our's, and real life isn't an episode of "24" (despite the Administration's wishes to the contrary); there's no commercial breaks and no grand conspiracy that can be taken down so sanity can be restored.
These issues and their consequences will take a long time to be worked out. It will be a long, tedious struggle for us to do so. And at the end of the day we may well see little return for our efforts, never mind a host of new problems that will need addressing.
That's life, but life changes. We and our society change.
It takes time and effort and vision for that to happen. And we all have our parts to play, however small they may be.
But it does matter. All of it and all of us here matter.
And yes, that includes shooter242; every court needs it's royal jester, and every garden it's snakes-in-the-grass.
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A post for Shooter
I think this one was written with you in mind:
http://hunter.dailykos.com/
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Williams / NBC news is only a symptom.
The actual disease is a lack of ethics. (Or an excess of greed.) Nothing matters but the bottom line. The ability to broadcast is supposed to be tied to the broadcaster acting in the public trust.
(Homework assignment: go to FCC website and see what standards licensees are supposed to live up to.) Maybe we can petition the FCC to pull GE's license. It won't work, but maybe it will get some press.
I know; if pigs had wings.....
Oh yeah, let's not forget to give a shout-out to the democratic president who signed media consolidation into law in the 1990's.
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@derbig mooser
I'll guess that you haven't misinterpreted what I wrote, but for the record, I agree that the facts do not support the whole perpetual-and-epic-war-for-civilization premise (and to your specific point re conscription, you may want to check out Andrew Bacevich's "Surging to Defeat", found here: http://amconmag.com/2008/2008_04_21/article1.html )
Indeed, in a later comment, you make the analogy to vaudeville, which I won't disagree with (and quite like).
However, I stand by my point, that in a militaristic society, one must expect greater prominence given to, and more public roles for, military men - to the extent that it is no longer a conflict of interest or propaganda.
Will you join me in raising a toast to the glorious victories of Petraeus?
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@ Lev Raphael - How about "nutbar" and "holocaust denier"?
Glenn responding to Lev Raphael's objections vis a vis Bernard Lewis...
I believe there's a distinction between a scholar and a rank propagandist, and I believe Lewis to be the latter, no matter how many degrees he has or how many books he's written. In my view, there is more to being a "scholar" than that.
-- GlennGreenwald
In August 2006, in an article about whether the world can rely on the concept of mutual assured destruction as a deterrent in its dealings with Iran, Lewis wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the significance of August 22 in the Islamic calendar. The Iranian president had indicated he would respond by that date to U.S. demands regarding Iran's development of nuclear power; Lewis wrote that the date corresponded to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427, the day Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad from Jerusalem to heaven and back. Lewis wrote that it would be "an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world." The article received significant press coverage.
[...}
Bernard Lewis was fined one-franc by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article.
[...]
In a 2002 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "Hot Talk" program, Noam Chomsky detailed a series of comments from a declassified Eisenhower Administration memo:
President Eisenhower, in an internal discussion, observed to his staff, and I'm quoting now, "There's a campaign of hatred against us in the Middle East, not by governments, but by the people." The National Security Council discussed that question and said, "Yes, and the reason is, there's a perception in that region that the United States supports status quo governments, which prevent democracy and development and that we do it because of our interests in Middle East oil. Furthermore, it's difficult to counter that perception because it's correct. It ought to be correct. We ought to be supporting brutal and corrupt governments which prevent democracy and development because we want to control Middle East oil, and it's true that leads to a campaign of hatred against us.
Chomsky claimed that Bernard Lewis, in his writings on the Middle East, omitted this and other evidence of Western culpability for failures in the region. Chomsky claimed:
Now, until Bernard Lewis tells us that, and that's only one piece of a long story, we know that he's just a vulgar propagandist and not a scholar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis