Evil GOP Bastards

Evil GOP Bastards

The role of the media. The lies of the Bush Administration are promulgated without rebuttal by the mainstream media. For example, in late October, 2004, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) reported reported that among Bush voters:

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56% believed that experts agreed that Iraq had WMDs

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75% believed that Iraq was either involved in 9/11 or gave substantial support to Al Queda.

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58% said that if Iraq did not have WMDs or was not involved with al Qaeda, the US should not have gone to war.

Accordingly, most Bush voters went to the polls believing demonstrably false information. The only possible source of that false information was the mainstream media (including right-wing talk radio and cable TV “news”). Clearly, the media took no pains to convey correct information to the voters. Furthermore, if the media had done so, Bush might well have lost over 5% of his votes, and the election. In short, he owed his re-election to the failure of the mainstream media to do its job of reporting the news.

And that’s just the beginning. The media further assisted Bush/Cheney by trumpeting the slander against John Kerry by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” and by muffling the evidence of Bush’s dereliction of duty to the Texas Air National Guard.

The Bush-friendly connivance of the mainstream media continues to this day, as news of “The Downing Street Memo,” with its compelling evidence of impeachable offenses by the President, remains hidden from the front pages of the newspapers and is completely absent from the TV news. So too any journalistic investigation of the integrity of the 2004 election, despite an abundant and ever-growing fund of evidence that the election was stolen.

During the past week, following the disclosure of Mark Felt as the Watergate “Deep Throat,” some pundits have asked, “Where is today’s Deep Throat?” To which others have replied, “No, the question is where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins today?” Both questions miss the mark. The relevant question is, “where are the Ben Bradlees and Kathryn Grahams today?” – (i.e., the editor and publisher of the Washington Post during the Watergate affair). Not in the “mainstream.” The voices of dissent, the remaining investigative journalists, and the conveyers of accurate information, are in the still small voice of the independent press and the internet.

And so, the power of the Presidency has subdued the mainstream media. Even so, the media has enormous, if unrealized, power over the Bush regime, for once the demonstrable facts of the Iraq War, the 9/11 attacks, the economic plunder by the corporations and the plutocrats, the stolen elections, the starvation of social services, etc., become known to the public, the Bush administration is finished, and the Republican party is destined for another generation in the political wilderness. This is the sword of Damocles that the media holds over the Bush gang.

It is a weapon that the mainstream media has chosen not to use, and is unlikely to use as long as its owners remain confined within the GOP reservation. So it is up to the independent publishers and the internet. Can they, at long last, get the facts out to the public? On that question, the future of the Bush Administration and the Republican party turns – and well they know it.

Herein is a grave danger to the Busheviks. A regime of lies can not long endure – especially so in this emerging “information age.” As Bush himself famously observed, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." And in fact, the truth is beginning to leak into the public awareness. Those PIPA statistics concerning the public misunderstanding of the Iraq war no longer apply, thus the Administration no longer pretends that Saddam’s WMDs and alliance with al Qaeda justifies the war. Now a majority of the public believes that the Iraq war was a mistake, and that proportion is increasing, as Bush’s approval ratings continue to plummet.

The credibility of the Bush regime is dissolving, and with it the regime’s scaffolding of lies. Donald Rumsfeld told us in March, 2003 that “We know where [the WMDs] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.” Subsequent searches of that area have exposed that lie. And Dick Cheney famously proclaimed in August, 2002 that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” That sound clip is being heard ever more frequently. So when Cheney appears on Larry King Live and says that he is “offended” by the Amnesty International report on torture, and insists that the Iraq insurgency is “in its last throes” – well, “fool me once...”

In the Soviet Union the Communist Party owned and controlled the media and the education system and ruthlessly excluded news and opinion from “the outside.” But it could not suppress The Beatles, Rock and Roll, FAXes, audio and video tapes, The Voice of America and the BBC – the youth culture and the nascent information age. All this, incidentally, before the Internet. So when at last the peoples of the several republics of the Soviet Union no longer believed the official lies, it was all over for the Communists.

Now the Bush regime has to contend with all that, plus “the internets” and the influx of “unofficial” but authentic information from within and from outside our borders.

Even so, most of the American people simply can’t yet get it into their heads that their President and Vice President, along with the chief members of the President’s Cabinet, are unscrupulous liars. But the notion is slowly infecting the body politic like a persistent mind-virus. People hate to discover that they’ve been lied to, and will often steadfastly deny that unpleasant truth. But once they finally acknowledge that they’ve been conned, then watch out! “Beware the wrath of the American people!”