On elitism, and complacency

You can talk about the doltishness of our president all you want, but you have to acknowledge his power and influence, and that your snarky comments aren't going to change anything when no one is listening. Rather than ignore (with more than a tinge of self-righteousness and elitism) the idiocy and dogmatism of Washington at this completely formative moment in US history, try and be engaged. Rather than throw up your hands and drop out completely as soon as you recognize the emptiness of "official" Washington language, and realize that emptiness does not translate into impotence--parse the rhetoric and recognize its destructiveness. Decades from now, when historians are doing the difficult and vital work of figuring out just what the fuck went wrong with American foreign and domestic policies at the beginning of the 21st century, where do you think they will turn? Just because contributors to a website like Counterpunch, or intrepid journalists like Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk, seem to be telling the "right" story in their current work, doesn't mean we can just leave it at that.

Nota bene: despite the repeated use of the second-person pronoun in this post, this really isn't directed toward one person/group of people in particular. Rather, it bemoans a general trend that helps no one understand what is happening in the world around us.

Of course, it's not easy. If you're declaring yourself to be "above" paying attention to a Bush press conference, you're not better off turning to the major American print news outlets.

Coverage in the mainstream media of George Bush's press conference yesterday only serves to highlight, in our opinion, the absolute complicity of the American press in the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. In a typically muddled piece of "analysis" printed today, the New York Times's David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker--politely--lend their voices to the growing chorus of those who think that, in the end, George Bush must inhabit an ideologically perverse and analytically barren alternate universe. That this is, at this point, far too easy to suggest, seems not to matter. By sticking, albeit tepidly, to Bush's executive war-speak about what shape the American "mission" will take in a "post-surge" scenario, Sanger and Shanker not only serve to legitimize and reinforce Bush's corrupt Near East agenda; they also (purposely?) obscure their own paper's role in selling the public an unmitigated atrocity. On top of this, their piece ends with a move that could have come from Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama themselves: namely, to blame the occupied for the crimes of the occupiers. To say that the government of Nuri al-Maliki just simply won't have the wherewithal, or even the desire, to perform the difficult task of political reconciliation among Shia and Sunnis in Iraq, is to absolve the U.S. government of all wrongdoing in bringing unthinkable death and destruction through an illegal invasion, and a military occupation that is almost five years old.

Yesterday, the editors of the Washington Post accused, it seems, everyone but themselves of "wishful thinking" on Iraq, saying that if Bush seems over-optimistic about the likelihood of the situation in Iraq changing by mid-September, then Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton are, at best, guilty of the same as regarding the consequences of a troop "withdrawal." Borrowing a tactic, it would seem, from Bush's own speechwriters, they stoop even lower than the execrable Times and offer the trillionth repetition of a "stay the course" mantra.

This comes hot on the heels of a Times editorial on Saturday demanding an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Nevermind that whenever ANYONE in the White House, Congress (excepting Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul), or mainstream media talks about "withdrawal," they are being disingenuous, for what they really mean is "redeployment," and a contuining presence of US troops in the Near East and Gulf states. Anthony DiMaggio sees right through the Times' and other mainstream US news publications recent "anti-war" turn on their editorial pages, and asks why it's come about 50 months too late--though this hypocritical about-face did prompt the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal to condemn the Times' "appeasement." The best we can say about these two latter publications is that, hey, at least they're consistent in their support of unbridled aggression to protect U.S. "interests."