On General Betray-Us

Just when I thought the Senate was incapable of legislating its way out of a paper bag, I was surprised to be proven wrong. Just the other day the esteemed upper house passed an amendment roundly condemning MoveOn.org for their ad pillorying Gen. Petraeus as “General Betray-Us.”
Although most Democrats voted against this silly piece of puffery, some went along, and two Democratic presidential contenders didn’t vote at all. Of course Sen. Lieberman (“Sen. Betray-Us” in my parlance), who makes the powerless Democratic majority possible, voted for the resolution. President Bush, nearly as excited as he was when he got that new mountain bike, jumped on the bandwagon instantly, accusing Dems “of cowering to the liberal political action group …” as Fox News in its entirely unbiased (we report the bull, you decide whether to consume it!) coverage termed it.
Okay, so …. 3,775 Americans and countless Iraqis have been lost to this debacle in Iraq. More die every day. The Democrats, criticized for failing to lead, simply don’t have the votes to alter the failed policies of a stubborn right-wing that clings to maniac dreams of success in a conflict they predict could go on for generations!? I’m sorry, these guys are nuts! We beat Nazi Germany & the Empire of Japan in four years and rebuilt their economies and our own in short order. Every day Iraq descends deeper into chaos, a fragmented entity with perhaps two dozen insurrections occurring simultaneously. Conservatives may blind themselves with images of a glass half-full, but anyone with a grip on reality knows the glass is completely shattered.
Which brings me back to General Petraeus: For months, when challenged on Iraq, the President lectured us: “We have to wait for Gen. Petraeus’s report.” I began to wonder where General Petraeus was, that we couldn’t get any information from him. Was he on a block of ice with sled dogs in the Arctic? Was he on the summit of some mountain peak in Nepal? Does he have a cell phone?
In the age of instant messaging, we had to wait till September 11th (ironic they picked that day, huh?) to hear exactly the lies and distortions that we expected. Armed with the same sort of charts and graphs evangelists use to try to prove the earth is only 6000 years old, Gen. Petraeus told us the surge was working. He told us violence was down. He told us what George Bush wanted us to hear.
He never mentioned that killings were down in provinces where the ethnic cleansings of Sunnis are complete, because all the Sunnis are dead or in exile. He didn’t tell us that we classify deaths differently depending on whether you are shot in the front of the head or the back of the head. (I’m not kidding: really!) He didn’t tell us that the Sunnis in Anbar joined us because they didn’t want to be ethnically cleansed like their brethren elsewhere. Then he told us he was recommending rotating some troops home, but he didn’t mention these were the same troops we were planning on bringing home all along. If any of this surprises you, you probably watch Fox News. They didn’t report any of that either.
So, is it fair to call him General Betray-Us? I don’t know: what do you want to call him?

FOX News Brainwashes Republican Loyalists

Despite the President’s appalling poll numbers – a 32% approval rating --it is reported that about 70% of registered Republicans still support him.
It seems impossible to reconcile this rationally!
By every measure, America is worse off than it was six years ago. Not only does the engine of the Bush administration run on a tankful of bankrupt ideology, but the car keeps swerving off the road. Most of us can see the cliff up ahead and cringe as the vehicle recklessly accelerates. Many Republicans, on the other hand, seem to think we’re taking a nice Sunday drive in the country. How can this be?
Are these Republican loyalists asleep in the back seat? Are they so blinded by their affiliation that they cannot recognize the bungling, malfeasance and abject failure of their party’s leadership.
I think there’s another explanation: they’ve been brainwashed.
I’ve spoken to many Republicans who actually believe that the war in Iraq is not going that badly. That Katrina victims aren’t really such victims, after all. That global warming is just a tree-hugger’s fantasy.
This is just what you will learn if you watch FOX News.
For years, the right-wing has been telling its followers that the media is not to be trusted, that it is dominated by a liberal bias. They have been advised to avoid The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN.
We could argue that all news reporting contains some element of editorial bias. That is not true of Fox News. Fox is primarily fiction disguised as news. You have as much chance of getting real news out of Fox as you would getting an unvarnished view of the West from Pravda in the height of the Cold War. Yet, Fox seems to be the primary source of the news for many Republicans. If that is the case, and if their media exposure is filled out by listening to Rush Limbaugh, watching “Hannity & Colmes” and reading Anne Coulter, then it is no wonder that their view of reality is so skewed. Propaganda reinforces propaganda.
As for the alleged liberal bias of the mainstream media, I just don’t see it. In fact, I’ve seen mostly the opposite, as establishment news organizations generally goose-stepped into Iraq with the Bush Administration.
I don’t think unkindly of Republican loyalists, but I do pity them for what they are missing. There is a greater variety of news available today than ever before. Traditional media represents just a fraction of what is out there: check out Google News on the web for thousands of news sources across the globe! I think if we could just get these die-hard Bush supporters to open their eyes and minds, they’d discover what the rest of us already know: this administration remains an unmitigated disaster for America.
Oh, and that cliff is just ahead ….