A friend's excellent LTTE

Hello All,

Yesterday my friend Paul Wickliffe emailed me the following letter to the editor he recently wrote to his local New Jersey newspaper, the Echoes-Sentinel. It has not yet been published, and it'll be interesting to see if it is. So - there's no link yet, but I thought it was excellent nonetheless and well worth posting here. With his permission, here you go.

bpcmxr

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America: "Rushed" to Judgment

The most important thing I learned from my public education was that it is a sign of intelligence to question authority.  I studied Orwell’s 1984 and how to separate propaganda from truth.  While originally intended to be applied to the study of the Soviet Union, it has become increasingly relevant to 21st Century America.  The Orwellian concept of “Ignorance is Strength” is that an uninformed populace is easier to control.  With the exception of a few daily newspapers and web sites, journalism is virtually dead in America.  Six corporations own over 90% of the media and what is important to their news divisions is not objectivity or detail, it’s ratings.  Most news stories have less than two minutes of content and are often followed by a predictable parade of bickering talking heads regurgitating party talking points.  That’s not journalism, it’s infotainment.  The televised media has effectively shortened our collective attention span so that news stories should take no longer to consume than the advertising used to sell them.  This is a world where Britney Spears got more hard news coverage than did opponents of the Iraqi war prior to the invasion.
 
Another Orwellian concept called “doublethink” is in the phrase “the liberal media.”  The Reagan administration ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 which required media outlets to give equal time to opposing points of view.  Ergo, Rush Limbaugh who calls himself “the truth detector” had no obligation to present truth or balance and from his far right vantage point, all media is indeed liberal.  For binary thinkers, who see the world in good or evil terms and want bite size answers to the world’s problems, Limbaugh’s commentary was more entertaining than genuine journalism.  Enter Fox News President Roger Ailes who produced campaign advertising for the big tobacco lobby, the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, and the short lived TV version of the Rush Limbaugh Show.   He saw a market to produce right biased news for the Limbaugh audience, to be “fair and balanced” in name only.  Fox News got great ratings, not because their reporting was better or more accurate, but because there was no firewall between commentary and journalism and the slanted stories satisfied the political beliefs of their audience.  As the other TV news outlets have “rushed” to imitate the Fox success;  unregulated capitalism has trumped journalistic integrity. 

This is dangerous.  For example, this week both President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld have finally admitted that Saddam had NOTHING to do with 9/11.  If you got your news from NPR/PBS, 84% of you already knew this while if you watched Fox, only 33% of you knew this.  This is not just limited to Fox.  Disney, which owns ABC, has broadcast the Limbaugh radio show for more than a decade yet when it came time for them to distribute Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, they refused because it was “biased.”  Apparently, it’s is not “bias” they object to, just left wing bias.  If you believe that Dan Rather is your proof, then at least he apologized for using forged documents unlike a certain President I could name.  So if the country is equally divided between left and right, how can the Republicans control all branches of government if the media is so liberal?

Big corporate media has a financial incentive to keep you uninformed.  Each of you pay more in federal income taxes than does GE and Microsoft combined, yet you won’t find that out by watching MSNBC, which they jointly own.  If the media actually performed a public service and educated you on the issues and gave candidates free time to express their views, corporate campaign funding wouldn’t control your government and make the media companies wealthy with political advertising.  Therefore, the party with the most corporate money wins, namely Republicans.  The Bush campaign has had more than 100 million dollars to destroy Kerry’s character.  The centerpiece of their campaign is Kerry’s statement, “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”  If you are an incurious ideologue that has no idea how the Senate works, you can be convinced that Kerry is a “flip-flopper.”  That falls apart when examined in detail.  The first version of the bill Kerry voted for contained more funding for body armor & veteran’s benefits and was funded by a combination of loans against future Iraqi oil revenue and rolling back the tax cuts for the top income bracket.  That bill failed.  The final version Kerry voted against had less for vet benefits, less for body armor and was financed by borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund, thereby adding to the deficit.  Since the Republican senators voted against it before they voted for it, then aren’t they “flop-flippers?”  Is Kerry still the most liberal senator when he voted for a more fiscally conservative and pro-soldier version of the bill than did the Republicans?  The real message this vote sent to those paying attention is that the working class is supposed to give up both the lives of their sons and daughters and the solvency of their retirement so that the ruling class can keep their tax cut and their kids in college.  Now that’s GOP patriotism!
 
Bush also claims that Kerry voted “for the war and then speaks out against it; he can’t have it both ways.”  He’d have a point if Congress declared war, but they didn’t.  What Kerry voted for was: “The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate.”  Bush asked for this authorization “to keep the peace” by sending in UN weapons inspectors.  Had Bush been honest and said, “I’m determined to invade Iraq and I want your blessing,” the vote would have been quite different.  Bush relies on uninformed binary thinkers to make his claims work, like “you are either with us or with the terrorists.”  If the election were held in Canada, Mexico or Great Britain, it would be Kerry in a landslide.  Our closest allies know that when we vote for a President that “doesn’t do nuance,”  all we get is “gunboat diplomacy.”  Being “resolute” didn’t help Custer at Little Big Horn, Napoleon at Waterloo, or Johnson in Vietnam.  I’m just glad Bush wasn’t President during the Cuban missile crisis because I doubt any of us would even be here.
 
Patriotism is not using the stars and stripes as a blindfold, parroting party talking points or putting a “Support the Troops” sticker on your gas guzzling Hummer.   Thomas Jefferson said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”  I’ve read letters in these pages over past month that compared the 500,000 demonstrators (according to NYPD) who marched before the RNC convention to anarchists and communists.  Well, I was there and I saw far more veterans, off-duty firefighters and grandmothers than I saw communists.  What we all had in common is a great desire to take truth to power.  The undeniable truth is that there was no Saddam-9/11 connection, no Iraqi nuclear program, no stockpiles of WMDs, no Iraqis greeting us as liberators, no plan for reconstruction or insurgency and no exit strategy.  Whether you were misled out of malice or incompetence, no one but the Bush neo-cons and the self delusional can deny that the invasion of Iraq was a colossal mistake.  And for those who think God speaks only to George Bush, remember even the Pope condemned the Iraq invasion.

Patriotism means voting for what’s best for the country, not for your tax bracket. Support the troops by firing their incompetent commander.  A great president will say, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” and a poor one can only scare you into voting for him.  Do not confuse blind obedience to party with patriotism.  If you still do, I have a message from the worst enemy we ever faced: 

"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along...  Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
- Hermann Goering, Hitler's Reich-Marshall at the Nuremberg Trials.

-Paul Wickliffe

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forgery.

Indeed "forgery proof" was proved to be crap.

Dan said sorry because the fellow who gave them to him would not admit to stealing them from the wastebasket - and claimed he was given the documents by an unknown group - thereby changing his story that he had told CBS.

Can I save this??

Your friend really wrote a great piece - if they publish it, they will probably whittle it down to 7 or 8 sentences, and it will end up looking goofy.

"how can the Republicans control all branches of government if the media is so liberal?"

I have one conservative friend left, and I constantly ask him this question because every time a story comes out that doesn't suit his viewpoint, he cites the liberal media. The myths of the liberal media and the tax and spend democrat are 2 things that have a death drip on this country.

nicely articulated, and not very defensive nor very offensive.

lovely, 2 thumbs up to your friend!