Are
Their Lips Moving?
Uncle
Bill Warner
"How
can you tell if the President is lying?....His lips are moving!"
You've heard that one, I'm sure. There has always been a concerted
effort to "educate" the public to a certain point of view
from the "bully pulpit" of the White House. The U.S. propaganda
machine is so powerful today that 40% of the American people believe
there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qu'ida, despite
that having been long-exposed as a lie! The President said it, didn't
he?
Under a totalitarian
dictatorship, there is not a lot of worry about what the people
think. Disagree, and find yourself incarcerated, tortured, or "disappeared"
or perhaps all three. Noam Chomsky, in his classic film "Manufacturing
Consent", posits that a government that is freely elected can
't just do anything it wants to, as the people have a vote every
couple of years, and it can be ousted from office. To work its will,
it must convince people that what it is doing is right and good
for the country.
On TV a beer
maker shows happy people partying, not a dead family on the road
that has been wiped out by a drunk driver. In Army-controlled footage
on Iraq you see mostly shots of our troops "doing stuff"
in Iraq, with 100,000 dead and mutilated Iraqis somehow getting
ignored. And how about the 15,000 "invisible" wounded
and maimed U.S. troops? Occasionally, a little reality slips through,
such as the Abu Ghraib photos or the "illegal" snapshot
taken and put on the Internet of the flag-draped coffins being secretly
off-loaded at Air Force bases in the dead of night, or the "outing"of
Jeff Gannon.
Remember Lincoln's
observation that, "You can fool some of the people all of the
time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you
can't fool all of the people all of the time!"? Well, it seems
like the goal of our leadership these days is more interested in
ruling than governing, and therefore a massive effort is being made
to deceive all of the people all of the time. If you can control
the "news" that reaches the people, you can pretty much
control their beliefs and actions. How much of what is really going
on is getting through to us? Not much, in the mainstream media,
anyway. Will the White House try to get ALL the news under its control?
Sure looks like they'd like it that way.
I was talking
to a young man in his late 20's the other day about the news. He
told me he had worked in public relations in the Army, and that
they routinely fed stories to the press that were printed verbatim,
despite being pure propaganda pieces for the most part. He said
he never believes anything he hears on the news, as he knows how
it is being manipulated. How much faith can we have in what comes
to us over the corporate media?
Consider who
owns the media. Can you have TV networks owned by major war contractors
like GE and Westinghouse and expect to get unbiased war stories?
Can you have radio networks that systematically deny equal access
to all points of view that do not jibe with those of the owners,
like the Clear Channel people? With 9 out of 10 radio call-in programs
being dominated by former right-wing criminals like G. Gordon Liddy
or Oliver North and downright liars like Rush Limbaugh are we really
getting the stuff we need to make decent decisions? On TV, Fox News
is a bad joke (totally dominated by the right wing and Rupert Murdoch).
CNN and the rest are hardly much better when it comes to being "balanced."
Most Left-Right debates are between people a little to the right
of center and people who are a LOT to the right of center, with
an occasional kook from far out in left field just to discredit
the mainstream progressives.
The list of
lies is endless. The myth of the "liberal" media, the
WMD fairy tale, the pro-pollution "Clean Air" act, the
kill-the-public schools "No Child Left Behind" act, the
logging industry's "Healthy Forests" act, Social Security
minus security "reform," and so on. The Bush Administration,
in addition to moving their lips, has now started a new news service
(Rumsfeld TV) run by the Pentagon, using taxpayer funds to present
the pro-military take on everything. As we don't have a Department
of Peace, no opposing view are presented. They will be feeding material
to the Republican-owned media, and it will soon be coming into your
homes on a regular basis.
Then there
are the journalistic prostitutes like Armstrong Williams who have
taken tens of thousands of dollars from our fearless leaders to
write supposedly "objective" pieces promoting certain
policies like the "No Child' s Behind Left" act. And how
about Jeff Gannon, AKA Guckert who strangely had unlimited passes
to White House press conferences where he was planted to steer the
questioning by asking "softball" questions? His "news"
organization, "Talon" we now know was just a web site
set up by the Republican Right. Now that his cover is blown he can
always go back to being a $200/hr. gay prostitute, but someone else
will take his place, I'm sure. (By the way, did you hear about him
on Fox News? Unlikely. Go to Google and see what you've been missing.)
I noticed that
the Gannon story was not given much play even in the non-Fox news.
Type "journalist prostitute" into Google and you'll get
about 350,000 hits. Hmmmmmm. I wonder where the "liberal"
press went? Who benefits when we are deceived or simply left uninformed?
Watch their lips ...
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