Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Right now, Fox News is advertising:
I am not going to make any Iran-Contra jokes this evening, except one.
"If you helped Reagan sell missiles to the Ayatollah so that coke mobsters in Latin America would get more weapons, what does that make you?"
"A trusted member of Fox News... if you ran the show, you get a show!!"
Only funny because it's true. Not because it's funny. Ollie also wrote a couple books such as The Jericho Sanction, with such chapter titles as Legacy of Death, The Letter, Intrigue, Traitors & Hostages, Blown Cover, The Wolf, Making Plans While Marking Time, and other highly original contributions. Then there is "Mission Compromised," something Ollie Poo would Never Do!
Reagan and God, from the link above:
But it was in his lifelong battle against communism – first in Hollywood, then on the political stage – that Reagan's Christian beliefs had their most profound effect. Appalled by the religious repression and state-mandated atheism of Bolshevik Marxism, Reagan felt called by a sense of personal mission to confront the USSR. Inspired by influences as diverse as C.S. Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he waged an openly spiritual campaign against communism, insisting that religious freedom was the bedrock of personal liberty. "The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual," he said in his Evil Empire address. "And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man."Well, you have to admit it's better than "Bring Em On!" Billmon memorializes the great actor who filled up a suit 40% more effectively than W.
In some ways, Reagan's biggest triumph was the creation an atmosphere of existential crisis, in he could play the stereotypical role of the man on a white horse. He had a brilliant script, written by a new type of PR consultant (Michael Deaver generally gets the top credit) ready to exploit the synergies of the merger between politics and show business. And, like all great myths, it had enough correspondance with the reality of the times to be believable.Billmon follows again with a look at the Legacy:But there was always a kind of stage set quality to it - the sense that if you looked behind the facade all you'd find would be plywood and paper mache.
The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for - in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new "strategic relationship" with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and (perhaps most ironic, given Reagan's tough guy image) the weakeness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beruit - all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.There's a whole slate of good films coming out. Check out "The Hunting of the President," telling the story of Clinton's sleazy tormenters. My favorite part of the trailer might be where one journalist says "We were following these stories simply because Scaife was paying us to do it," presumably referring to the evil Republican billionaire industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife indeed dropped a fat $2,400,000 on the American Spectator magazine to go after Clinton, along with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation... on and on and on... more about the foundations.But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America....
The second movie is of course Fahrenheit 9/11 (Quicktime trailer). I am not a uniform supporter of Michael Moore, particularly with glaring inaccuracies that pop up all over some of his stuff. Regardless, the man is a pressure release valve on the hypocrisy and contradictions in what they're trying to sell us. He is shrill and unpleasant a great amount of the time, but that's tempered by a real quest to bring us something significant, at odds with the mainstream narrative.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.In other news, a splendid review of media bias by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.
The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
...
....saying that while terrorists must be confronted, the bigger problem is the extremist Islamic ideology that produces them.''What you have is a civil war in that religion where a small minority are trying to hijack it,'' he said.
This is just so damn goofy: an RNC promotional website for Hispanics that offers them four job choices: war veterans, teachers, senior citizens, or farmers and ranchers. Yes, that is where they fit in. (via WaPo)
Religious crusaders attacking the separation of church and state, while bringing political campaign pressure straight into churches. Safety for atheists not assured.
Posted by HongPong at June 7, 2004 03:19 AM