Does Sanity Matter?
Demo Hassan
By Robert Parry
October 29, 2010
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/102910.html
As satire has done through the ages, Jon Stewart's
"Rally to Restore Sanity" has found a comedic way
to focus national attention on a serious issue:
Will the United States begin acting like a
responsible force in the world or will it continue
to wander off into its own ghastly dreamscape?
Millions of Americans have responded positively
to Stewart's message, with thousands arriving from
all over the country to take part in Stewart's
semi-serious rally at the National Mall in
Washington on Saturday.
But other Americans are confused about why someone
would call a march for "sanity," and some who get
the point are perturbed by its implicit criticism
of their own craziness.
Whether Stewart's rally will have any lasting
effect is another question. Is it possible that
many Americans don't want to be sane? Or put
differently, are they addicted to the crazy?
Is watching the madness of Glenn Beck simply
too much fun for many? Are Rush Limbaugh's
rants a way for listeners to feel better about
their own personal grievances, by blaming the
hated "liberals" or the "minorities" or some
other scapegoats?
Especially on the Right, crazy has become the
bread-and-butter. For Muslim-haters like
Michael Savage and Steven Emerson -- not to
mention the bigger names like Limbaugh and
Beck -- irrationality and fear-mongering are
how they rile up their audiences and make
their money.
Crazy also is how you trump rationality.
You can dismiss it as "liberal elitism"
brought to you by those pointy-headed,
we-know-better-than-you-do Al Gore types,
folks who want us to listen to the
"scientists" as they explain about the
looming calamity of global warming and
stuff like that. Isn't it more fun to simply
call scientific judgments "myths" and feel
superior to all those PhD guys?
To the Religious Right, irrationality has
another role, as a defense of "biblical truth"
in the face of reason. Anyone who operates
under the principles of empiricism and
objectivity is by definition a "liberal" for
not accepting the Bible and Faith as the
provider of all answers.
Many centrists are uncomfortable with Stewart's
rally for a different reason. They may find his
jokes amusing, but they reject his more serious
message -- that the U.S. political/media process
has gone quite literally mad. If you're a
Washington-Post-or-CNN-styled journalist,
you simply can't accept that the system you
have helped sustain is insane.
To do so -- and to be honestly self-critical --
would require acknowledging that you sat on your
hands in the face of George W. Bush's violent
delusions of the past decade because to do
otherwise would have put your salary at risk.
For these centrists to accept the need to
restore sanity would require them to admit
they tolerated madness.
Some on the Left also have trouble with
Stewart's observation about how insane things
have become because they, too, have operated
with their own unrealistic expectations, at
least about how much can be done and how
quickly. As we also have seen with some of
the conspiracy excesses of the 9/11 truther
movement, anti-empiricism is not a monopoly
of the Right.
Still, the American Right must be seen as the
principal culprit in the decoupling of
America from rationality.
The latest manifestation of the Right's
wackiness can be found in the rise of the
Tea Party, a movement of supposedly grassroots,
mad-as-hell regular Americans. However, even
that image is an illusion. The reality is that
the movement is heavily subsidized by wealthy
corporate donors (such as the billionaire
Koch brothers) who want to ensure deregulation
of their industries.
The reality that the Tea Party's phony
"grassroots" obscures is that the hated
federal government is the only force
potentially powerful enough -- if it
were energized on behalf of the
people -- to counter the overwhelming
might of multinational corporations.
By hobbling the government, the Tea
Partiers are simply empowering the
corporations to run everything.
But the Tea Partiers have been persuaded that
they are the new revolutionaries fighting for
America against all those who would sap its
strength -- from the liberals and the illegals,
to the Muslims and the atheists -- but most of
all, the federal government itself.
How It Happened
But how did the United States of America get
here? How could the most powerful nation on
earth with a sophisticated media reach this
place where a comedian is needed to point out
how crazy the political system has become?
In the 1980s, early in the Reagan administration
as an investigative reporter for the Associated
Press, I was encountering so much deceptive
propaganda regarding U.S. policies on Central
America that I half-jokingly asked an editor
what should an American news organization do
if the U.S. government went from lying once in
a while to lying all the time?
The realistic answer at AP and other mainstream
news organizations was to retreat and to avoid
any head-on battles. The thinking was that the
cheerful dishonesty of Ronald Reagan, a former
actor and ad pitchman, would eventually fade
away and rationality would return, that the
pendulum would swing back on its own.
But the imaginary pendulum never worked.
Instead, through the 1980s, the Right used
its combined power of the Executive Branch
and the emerging right-wing media to assert
control over reality itself. A few politicians
and journalists fought back, but most
accommodated and waited.
Meanwhile, Reagan won over large segments of
the U.S. electorate with his something-for-nothing
promises. Indeed, his greatest role as an actor
may have been as the Pied Piper leading the
American people off to their doom.
Reagan promised that tax cuts tilted to the
rich would generate more revenue and eliminate
the federal debt; that this money also could
finance a massive military buildup which would
frighten America's enemies and restore national
prestige; that freeing corporations from
government regulations and from powerful unions
would herald a new day of prosperity brought
about by the magic of "free trade" and
"free markets"; that the country could turn
its back on alternative energy and simply drill
for more oil; that whites no longer had to feel
guilty about the plight of blacks; that
traditional "values" -- i.e. rejection of the
"counter-culture" -- would bring back the good
old days when men were men and women were women.
Despite the appeal of Reagan's message to many,
it was essentially an invitation to reject reality.
Even Reagan's vice presidential nominee,
George H.W. Bush, had famously labeled Reagan's
tax-cut scheme "voodoo economics." Early in
Reagan's presidency, his budget director
David Stockman acknowledged that the tax cuts
would flood the government in red ink.
But tax policy wasn't Reagan's only
ignore-the-future policy. Rejecting President
Jimmy Carter's warnings about the need for
renewable energy sources, Reagan removed
Carter's solar panels from the White House
roof and left the nation dependent on oil.
Reagan also led campaigns to break unions and
to free corporations from government regulations.
Perception Management
In foreign policy -- although the Soviet Union
was in rapid decline -- Reagan put ideological
blinders on the CIA's analysts to make sure
they exaggerated the Soviet menace and
justified his military buildup.
Reagan achieved this "politicization" of the
CIA by placing in charge his campaign chief
William Casey, who, in turn, picked a young
CIA careerist named Robert Gates to purge the
analytical division of its long tradition of
objectivity. Gates arranged the scariest
intelligence estimates possible.
Reagan also credentialed a group of young
intellectuals who became known as the
neoconservatives -- the likes of Elliott Abrams,
Richard Perle and Robert Kagan -- who emerged from
an elitist tradition (advocated by philosopher
Leo Strauss) that it was their proper role to
manipulate the less-educated masses and guide
the people in a desired direction.
The neocons worked with seasoned CIA propagandists,
like Walter Raymond Jr. who was moved over to the
National Security Council, to develop what was
called "perception management" for controlling
how the American people would see and
understand things.
The neocons used fear, exaggeration and lying
to get the American people behind Reagan's
support for brutal military regimes in El Salvador
and Guatemala as well as the contra rebels seeking
to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist
Sandinista government.
Perception management operatives targeted honest
journalists, human rights activists and
congressional investigators who dug up unwanted
facts that challenged Reagan's propaganda.
To discredit truthful messages, the neocons
"controversialized" the messengers.
These techniques proved very successful, in
large part, because many senior executives
at leading news outlets -- from the AP where
general manager Keith Fuller was a Reagan
enthusiast to the New York Times where executive
editor Abe Rosenthal was himself a neocon -- sided
with the propagandists against their own journalists.
Meanwhile, the American Right was building its
own media infrastructure with wealthy foundations
footing the bills for a host of political magazines.
Far-right religious cult leader Sun Myung Moon
poured billions of mysterious dollars into the
Washington Times and other media operations.
By contrast, the American Left mostly under-funded
or even de-funded its scattered media outlets.
Some, like Ramparts and Dispatch News, were
shuttered, while other formerly left-of-center
publications, such as The New Republic and
The Atlantic, changed hands to neocon and
conservative owners.
Despite the long-term costs, Reagan made many
Americans feel good in the short run. Many bought
into Reagan's notion that "government is the
problem." In 1984, Reagan's gauzy "Morning in
America" vision won big over Walter Mondale's
appeal for fiscal responsibility.
The Iran-Contra Window
Perhaps the last best hope to reassert reality
came with the Iran-Contra scandal, which played
out from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.
Reagan's secret arms-for-hostages deals with
Iran had the potential to unravel an interconnected
series of national security cover-ups and scandals,
including cocaine smuggling by Reagan's contras
and creation of the "perception management"
operation itself.
However, again, truth about these complex scandals
was not considered that important, either in
Congress or within the Washington news media.
The governing Democrats, the likes of Rep.
Lee Hamilton and later President Bill Clinton,
chose to sweep the scandals under the rug in
the hope that the Republicans would reciprocate.
Not only were hopes for bipartisanship
unrequited, the Republicans grew more
emboldened and more partisan. The GOP
and its allies ramped up personal attacks
on Clinton by turning loose their powerful
new media infrastructure, which by the
1990s featured the Right's domination
of AM talk radio.
A typical example of the Right's propaganda
was to distribute lists of "mysterious deaths"
of people somehow connected to President Clinton.
Though there was no evidence that Clinton was
implicated in any of the deaths, the sophistry
rested simply on the number of cases.
What the Right learned was that it could
achieve political gain with the American
people by circulating an endless supply
of baseless or wildly exaggerated allegations.
Many Americans would believe them just because
of the repetition over right-wing talk radio
and other outlets.
On Election Night 1994, Democrats were stunned
by how effective the tactic of using bogus and
hyped anti-Clinton charges proved to be.
Between the smearing of Bill and Hillary Clinton
and the voters desire to punish Democrats for
raising taxes to close the Reagan-Bush-41-era
deficits, the Republicans swept to control of
the House and Senate.
The Fox Effect
In the years that have followed -- especially
with the emergence of Fox News in the
mid-to-late 1990s -- the dominance of right-wing
propaganda over non-ideological reality moved
to the center of the American political process.
The rout of rationality was on.
During Campaign 2000, journalists from publications
such as the New York Times and the Washington Post
ganged up on Al Gore. They even put made-up quotes
in his mouth so they could haze him as if they
were the cool kids on campus and he was the goofy
nerd. By contrast, journalists knew to fawn all
over the ultimate big man on campus, George W. Bush,
as he made them feel important by giving
them nicknames.
When Gore still narrowly defeated Bush in Election
2000, the major news media stood aside as Bush and
the Republicans stole the White House.
The see-no-evil attitude hardened after the 9/11
attacks when mainstream outlets, including the
New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN,
consciously misreported their own findings of a
Gore victory in Florida, based on an unofficial
media recount. Instead of leading with that
remarkable fact, they buried the lede and
highlighted that Bush would still have won
some partial, hypothetical recounts.
The media mood after 9/11 -- a combination of
misguided patriotism and fear of right-wing
retaliation -- caused the mainstream press to
retreat further from a fight for reality.
Key journalists, such as the Times' reporter
Judy Miller and the Post's editorial page editor
Fred Hiatt, even became collaborators with
Bush's propaganda about Iraq.
Meanwhile, the neocons, who had returned to
power under Bush, reprised their old strategy
of perception management, stoking excessive
fears of Iraq's mythical WMD programs and
stomping out any embers of doubt. For millions
of Americans, the WMD lies became truth as
they were repeated everywhere, from Fox News
and Rush Limbaugh to the pages of the
Washington Post and the New York Times.
Since President Obama's election in 2008,
the Right has again pulled out the old
disinformation bag of tricks. The Right
used its media dominance to pound the public
with barrage after barrage of conspiracy
theories about Obama.
Anti-Obama falsehoods took on the color of
truth simply by their endless retelling.
For instance, the canard that Obama was born
in Kenya, not Hawaii as his birth certificate
shows, gained credibility with large numbers
of Americans. Similarly, the Right convinced
tens of millions that Obama is a Muslim,
though he is Christian.
At this late stage, the Republican Party
and the Right recognize that they can
dominate American politics through a clever
mix of disinformation and faux populism,
especially when dealing with a confused
and embittered electorate.
But other Americans understand that craziness
is not the way to rebuild the nation or to
make the United States a responsible force in
the world. That is why Jon Stewart's Rally to
Restore Sanity has touched a popular nerve.
It may be all that stands in the way
of a landslide victory for insanity.
-- Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/102910.html
Gray Ghost
059ea9...@26g2000yqv.googlegroups.com:
> Does Sanity Matter?
Apparently not. The article is riddled with bigotry.
--
Democrat donkey pontificating:
Americans only oppose Obama because they are racist....
Americans were against the stiumulus because they are uneducated....
Americans oppose socialism because they are greedy....
Americans are against Obamacare because they are stupid....
Americans are opposed to the Ground Zero mosque because they are bigots....
I just can't figure why Americans are opposed to us.
Maybe 'cuz we're racist, uneducated, greedy, stupid bigots.
Or maybe it's 'cuz you morons sound like Nazis talking about Jews in the
1930s.
GlennR
"Gray Ghost" <grey_ghost47...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9E215F29CF863We...@216.196.97.142...
> Demo Hassan <demoh...@yahoo.com.mx> wrote in
> news:2e0b8a3b-9866-425e-a942-
> 059ea9...@26g2000yqv.googlegroups.com:
>
>> Does Sanity Matter?
>
> Apparently not. The article is riddled with bigotry.
>
> --
> Democrat donkey pontificating:
>
> Americans only oppose Obama because they are racist....
> Americans were against the stiumulus because they are uneducated....
> Americans oppose socialism because they are greedy....
> Americans are against Obamacare because they are stupid....
> Americans are opposed to the Ground Zero mosque because they are
> bigots....
> I just can't figure why Americans are opposed to us.
>
> Maybe 'cuz we're racist, uneducated, greedy, stupid bigots.
that's right you are, I'm happy you're admitting the fact
Jeremy H. Donovan
>
> Does Sanity Matter?
>
> By Robert Parry
> October 29, 2010
> http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/102910.html
> You can dismiss it as "liberal elitism"
> brought to you by those pointy-headed,
> we-know-better-than-you-do Al Gore types,
> folks who want us to listen to the
> "scientists" as they explain about the
> looming calamity of global warming and
> stuff like that. Isn't it more fun to simply
> call scientific judgments "myths" and feel
> superior to all those PhD guys?
When ideology trumps hard research, that is indeed 'crazy'.
> To the Religious Right, irrationality has
> another role, as a defense of "biblical truth"
> in the face of reason. Anyone who operates
> under the principles of empiricism and
> objectivity is by definition a "liberal" for
> not accepting the Bible and Faith as the
> provider of all answers.
It seems as if the Right always has to be dragged kicking and
screaming into the future. They tend to serve mainly as a 'drag' on
needed progess, always making it take three times as long as it should
to arrive at the changes the world really needed ... yesterday.
> Many centrists are uncomfortable with Stewart's
> rally for a different reason. They may find his
> jokes amusing, but they reject his more serious
> message -- that the U.S. political/media process
> has gone quite literally mad. If you're a
> Washington-Post-or-CNN-styled journalist,
> you simply can't accept that the system you
> have helped sustain is insane.
>
> To do so -- and to be honestly self-critical --
> would require acknowledging that you sat on your
> hands in the face of George W. Bush's violent
> delusions of the past decade because to do
> otherwise would have put your salary at risk.
> For these centrists to accept the need to
> restore sanity would require them to admit
> they tolerated madness.
More like it is that I sat through that 8 years wringing my hands.
Other than speaking out which I did, what else could I have done
besides 'tolerate' it?
> The latest manifestation of the Right's
> wackiness can be found in the rise of the
> Tea Party, a movement of supposedly grassroots,
> mad-as-hell regular Americans. However, even
> that image is an illusion. The reality is that
> the movement is heavily subsidized by wealthy
> corporate donors (such as the billionaire
> Koch brothers) who want to ensure deregulation
> of their industries.
>
> The reality that the Tea Party's phony
> "grassroots" obscures is that the hated
> federal government is the only force
> potentially powerful enough -- if it
> were energized on behalf of the
> people -- to counter the overwhelming
> might of multinational corporations.
> By hobbling the government, the Tea
> Partiers are simply empowering the
> corporations to run everything.
It's a fascinating contradiction. I simply call that: shooting
yourself in the foot, because you were too dumb to put on the safety.
> Reagan promised that tax cuts tilted to the
> rich would generate more revenue and eliminate
> the federal debt
That might work if the tax cuts were modest and for the middle class
not the rich. Trickle down is bs.
> that this money also could
> finance a massive military buildup which would
> frighten America's enemies and restore national
> prestige
What a great benefit to get for hundreds of billions of dollars:
fear. ??
> that freeing corporations from
> government regulations and from powerful unions
> would herald a new day of prosperity brought
> about by the magic of "free trade" and
> "free markets";
Enslave by promising 'freedom'?
> that the country could turn
> its back on alternative energy and simply drill
> for more oil;
The worst mistake of all. The real war of our time is the war to
establish clean, renewable energy on a global basis. If we could do
that it would be the foundation of a true 'new age'. And I figured
that out even before Reagan's time. Still waiting...
> Despite the long-term costs, Reagan made many
> Americans feel good in the short run. Many bought
> into Reagan's notion that "government is the problem."
And that's ... a big problem. I mostly sat wringing my hands through
the Reagan years too, as they did their best to roll back many of the
forward leaps of the 60's...
> What the Right learned was that it could
> achieve political gain with the American
> people by circulating an endless supply
> of baseless or wildly exaggerated allegations.
> Many Americans would believe them just because
> of the repetition over right-wing talk radio
> and other outlets.
It's important to make sure one's views are fact-based, but
unfortunately a great many people do not. I'd even say they were the
true 'silent majority'... except that most of them aren't silent.
> In the years that have followed -- especially
> with the emergence of Fox News in the
> mid-to-late 1990s -- the dominance of right-wing
> propaganda over non-ideological reality moved
> to the center of the American political process.
> The rout of rationality was on.
But as they say, the thing about reality is that it doesn't go away if
you stop believing in it. Eventually, if you fail to heed reality it
will bite you in the ass big time.
> Anti-Obama falsehoods took on the color of
> truth simply by their endless retelling.
> For instance, the canard that Obama was born
> in Kenya, not Hawaii as his birth certificate
> shows, gained credibility with large numbers
> of Americans. Similarly, the Right convinced
> tens of millions that Obama is a Muslim,
> though he is Christian.
It's hard to believe anybody could be that stupid, but - as the man
says - 'large numbers' believed this crap, in spite of how documented
truth was widely available.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthcertificate.asp
> At this late stage, the Republican Party
> and the Right recognize that they can
> dominate American politics through a clever
> mix of disinformation and faux populism,
> especially when dealing with a confused
> and embittered electorate.
Yeah, and I really do find that ... genuinely disgusting.
> But other Americans understand that craziness
> is not the way to rebuild the nation or to
> make the United States a responsible force in
> the world. That is why Jon Stewart's Rally to
> Restore Sanity has touched a popular nerve.
Fact-based beliefs would be a nice start for most people. But if you
can't or won't acquire some then ... hey, rest assured that reality IS
sneaking up to take a big ol' honkin' bite outa yo ASS, and it will
happen sooner than you think.
Original article:
> http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/102910.html