Tag Archives: MSNBC

Political Rants

How the hearings stack up against hearings past.

As someone who tends to pay attention to these things, I watched the first night of the January 6th Committee hearings with some interest. MSNBC spent a week winding up to these public meetings, and the committee did not, in my estimation, disappoint. I don’t know who in America remains persuadable on this issue, but it’s hard to watch the proceedings and not come away thinking about what an outrage January 6 was.

When I say January 6, I mean the whole enchilada. The day was just the culmination of a long process which the president at the time set in motion. As shocking as the attack was – and I, like many, watched it unfold with disbelief – Trump had long demonstrated his contempt for elections, and spent much of 2020 undermining the credibility of mail-in and absentee ballots. This was because he knew that Democrats were more likely to opt for vote by mail than to show up at the polling place. The hearings are highlighting this dynamic, and it’s all to the good.

Haldeman’s racist lawyer

Not surprisingly, many commentators have invoked the Watergate hearings back in 1973 to give context to the current proceedings. I’m old enough to remember these being broadcast on television, though I can only recall the high (or low) points, like when Haldeman’s shriveled old lawyer called Senator Dan Inouye – a wounded WWII veteran – “that little jap”. That was world-class.

The thing that’s notable about the Watergate scandal was its iceberg-like quality of revealing just the tip of what was hidden from view. Author Jefferson Morley talked about this on Majority Report this week. Several of Nixon’s “plumbers” were CIA assets or agents with a long history of involvement in the Agency’s abuses at home and overseas. More of the truth came out during the Church Committee investigation a few years later, but it was kind of a controlled burn, according to Morley. (Practically at the same time as Church, Cuban exile Agency assets blew up Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in D.C. and the Cuban Olympic Fencing team in mid-air.)

Reagan’s little game

Perhaps the second most well-known Congressional investigation was Iran Contra during the Reagan administration. This, too, represented a tiny corner of a much larger enterprise. The select Committee (led by Inouye, incidentally) looked into Reagan’s circumvention of the Congress’s law barring direct aid to the Contra terrorists operating in Nicaragua with our assistance. (We had essentially created the force out of thin air.) The crime was breaking the law passed by Congress, not the persecution of Nicaraguans.

Beyond that, though, Reagan’s team headed by Oliver North and General Secord sold TOW missiles and some spare parts to the Iranian government, which was defending itself against an invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – an invasion supported by the United States! Interestingly, very little about America’s role in the Iran-Iraq conflict came to light through these hearings. Neither did the committee touch on how the U.S. government was supporting murderous dictatorial regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere.

Old fashioned grift and graft

The January 6th Committee proceedings are looking at something kind of different. This is more garden variety corruption and authoritarian tendencies, though as always, racism is part of the story. Trump tried to lie his way into permanent status as president, and has thus far failed. He bilked his own supporters out of hundreds of millions of dollars, saying they were contributing to a legal defense fund. Guy has no shame.

I guess the thing that ties them all together is authoritarianism and a strong desire to override the will of the people, either by discounting their votes or ignoring their elected representatives. That much hasn’t changed.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

An atrocity by any other name

It kind of feels like we crossed a line this past week. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy called a massacre on the outskirts of Kviv a “genocide.” U.S. media outlets and cable television shows have picked up the term and run with it. The first I heard doing this was MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez, ordinarily progressive daughter of the bellicose New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, but it was really all over the place.

The Rachel Maddow show has, in her absence, played a lead role in platforming voices advocating deeper U.S. involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. Her guest host has brought on one member of the Ukrainian parliament multiple times, giving her the opportunity to advocate for no-fly zones, shame the U.S. for not taking this more seriously, etc. I can understand the minister’s frustration, but seriously – this type of intervention simply cannot happen. And yet day after day I see the corporate media laying out the predicate for a wider war.

Opting for the “G” word

The act of calling what we’ve seen in Ukraine a “genocide” is inappropriate and, frankly, irresponsible. The legal definition of the term is fairly broad, but we should focus on the intent behind its use. This is part and parcel of the effort to invoke the “humanitarian intervention” impulse on the part of the NATO powers, particularly the United States. I touched on this a couple of weeks ago, and it seems to be a central component of the war-party’s argument.

Since the war in Kosovo back in the nineties, every drive toward intervention has been at some point associated with a claim of humanitarian necessity. It was deployed in the case of Afghanistan, certainly in Iraq, in Libya. It is an attempt to build the case for war on a foundation of moral outrage, inspiring a will to do something – anything – that will stop the killing. And because we’re Americans, the notion of “doing something” always amounts to military action.

Lies are helpful, but not necessary

Of course, what we’re seeing in Ukraine is horrendous, inexcusable. There is no question but that the Russian military is in disarray, and it is taking it out on the Ukrainians. I’m sure some of their wanton killing is fueled by the high casualty rate they have suffered since the start of the invasion. Many thousands of their fellow soldiers have died, much of their senior leadership has been killed, and they are apparently taking revenge on defenseless people.

It’s good that this war is being covered so thoroughly. This should happen with every war, especially those – like Yemen – that we are directly responsible for. But the fact is, we are being propagandized by our corporate media. That propaganda is not built on lies – it is built on the awful truth of what’s going on over there. The coverage, however, seeks to heighten the outrage, to drill the horror into us again and again, and to offer suggestions as to what we as a nation can do to stop it. It is a full-court press, make no mistake, and it is working to a large extent.

Keep calm, carry on

How do we counter this onslaught? By not losing our heads. By encouraging everyone within earshot to temper their outrage with some understanding of the stakes involved in global war. We simply do not have the luxury of treating Russia like it is Serbia; the risk to humanity is too great. We have approached the brink of destruction before, in the early 1960s, the late 70s, the early 80s, and we got lucky. Let’s not press our luck.

Ultimately, war will not solve this crisis. Indeed, resort to war will only make the crisis worse. We need to be more creative and constructive than that.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The titanic struggle: A-holes vs. effers

Another week of wall-to-wall reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That characterization of the operation is tantamount to a federal offense now in Russia. Whereas there they use force to make people think a certain way, over here we use the Edward Bernays method. That’s why polling shows a majority of Americans wanting the President to be “tougher” in his approach to the Ukraine crisis.

Majority support for policies that could easily result in total nuclear annihilation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Reporting on the atrocities Russia is committing in Ukraine flows in a constant stream from the corporate media. To be clear, it is 100% something that should be reported on heavily. But this is more than coverage. It is an influence campaign, and it may just get us all killed.

A game of absolutes

One of the sure signs that the networks are propagandizing us is the characterization of this war as part of a broader struggle between freedom and tyranny. Even Chris Hayes went on a tear about his last week, bizarrely extending this metaphor to the Cold War era. This claim doesn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Did we fight our near-genocidal war in Vietnam for “freedom”? I think not. Read Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves. This is not good vs. evil, for we are not good.

Now, I expect this kind of thing out of the likes of Joe Scarborough, who is constantly laboring at the Reagan myth, desperately trying to keep it alive for another generation. Even on his show you will hear from people counseling caution, like Richard Haas. Those are the exceptions, though. It’s mostly a chorus of voices bearing witness to the suffering of Ukrainians in minute detail, showing frustration out of a lack of action on the part of the administration. The absolutism of good vs. evil is an essential component in their argument.

More like 1914 … or 2003

Frequent MSNBC guest Michael McFaul is back on the network, having suffered no real penalty for his endorsement of a comparison between Putin with Hitler, in which Hitler came out ahead. He was on Twitter telling people to stop talking about World War III, which was odd because he seems so wrapped up in World War II. McFaul is a fan of brinkmanship with respect to Ukraine – he thinks we can get a lot closer to open conflict without risk of nuclear war.

This is what happens when people take their own analogies too seriously. This is not World War II. We have nuclear weapons – thousands of them. We cannot do the kinds of things we did before those weapons existed. It’s simply not an option. There are many reasons why this period is nothing like 1939, but the nuclear question is probably the most salient difference. In all honesty, if you’re going to compare this with a world war, the closer analogy is 1914, when an accidental war prompted Europeans to slaughter each other by the millions for no good reason.

Don’t burn bridges

I’ve said it before. There’s only one way out of this horrendous conflict, and that’s through some kind of negotiated settlement. Cranking up the rhetoric makes this less likely, not more. For the Ukrainians’ sake, it’s better to make the deal now than later when their country is in even more of a shambles and many thousands more have lost their lives.

Ultimately Russia and Ukraine are going to have to reconcile themselves to being neighbors. That’s never going to change – it’s just geography. They need to find a path out of this mess, and we need to do everything in our power to help them get there.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.