A DARK, WARM MOIST PLACE

by Malik Isasis


Last week was a wet dream for the 24-hour news networks. A distraught astronaut drove across the country to kill a romantic rival; and reality star and tabloid fodder, Anna Nicole Smith, collapsed and died. Both stories are tragedies in their own right; however, the corporate media can’t help but to over indulge themselves and treat both stories as breaking news. It’s if they have no control—like an alcoholic bellying up to the bar for a drink; every news program becomes wall-to-wall coverage with pundits, consultants, and psychologists.

It is incredibly cheap to produce wall-to-wall coverage of tabloid stories with stock footage, round table discussions, and placing a newsreader on location, repeating the same facts over, and over and over again.

While the corporate media shake the shiny keys of distraction, Democrats began hearings on the disappearance of 12 billion dollars during the early phases of the Iraq Occupation, and reconstruction. The hearings received very little corporate press. This too could have been covered very cheaply but the corporate media made a choice, and that choice was to focus all of its resources covering two stories that were tragic but had absolutely no national impact.

The virus.

Corporate news organizations such as CNN and MSNBC have been so well assimilated by the right-wing hate machine, that it is second nature for them to continue to legitimatize someone like indicted former House Majority House Leader Tom Delay, who was recently on Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room to spread fear of an inevitable Clinton presidency.

Why would CNN give the disgraced congressman a platform to spew his pollution onto the airwaves?

Republicans and their neocon cabal have begun a whisper campaign on Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, concerning a request for a bigger commuter plane. The political hit job was designed to make Pelosi look petty and power hungry.

Republicans are taking issue with the size of the plane Pelosi would need to fly in to reach her hometown of San Francisco without refueling. There are three Air Force airplanes that have the fuel capacity to make the trip nonstop, with the largest being a C-32 plane, a military version of the Boeing 757-200.

Corporate media has fostered this false sense of Republican outrage by reporting it as legitimate news, leaving Speaker Pelosi to explain the web of deception and distortion. In this ABC transcript, Speaker Pelosi had to explain the asinine charges:

Pelosi: Well first of all, let me say that all of this springs from the Sergeant at Arms office, which is in charge of security for Members of Congress and the Speaker of the House. For matters of security, the Sergeant at Arms has said that he wanted the practice to continue, that what was applied to Mr. Hastert, the Speaker of the House since 9/11, to have transportation to and from home to be provided.
I have never asked for any larger plane. I have said that I am happy to ride commercial if the plane they have doesn't go coast to coast. I'm happy to ride commercial coast to coast that way. We've never asked for a larger plane - this is a myth that [the Republicans] are talking about on the floor. They have nothing to say to the American people about the war, the economy, global warming, and the rest. So they have this game they're playing.

In an attempt to tap into American bigotry, the right wing hate machine has tried to smear Senator Barack Obama with associating him with Islamic radicalism because he attended a secular madrassa in Indonesia as a child. Even though the madrassa was found to be secular and was not radical, Obama had to defend himself. Take a look at this clip from Media Matters, where Obama and Clinton are attacked simultaneously.

Former Senator John Edwards has faced similar smears when right wing political whores Michelle Malkin, and William Donahue accused Edwards’ bloggers of anti-Catholicism. Edwards was quick to put the story to bed by sticking by the bloggers.

The right wing strategy is death by a thousand paper cuts. It’s effective (R.I.P John Kerry). They have a big bucket of shit and fling it against the wall and whatever sticks, they make hay out of it by force-feeding the corporate media; the corporate media then regurgitates this shit as ‘controversial’ or truth, thereby forcing usually a Democrat, off message to defend him/herself.

The corporate media is a wittingly host for the right wing virus, helping to spread political petulance. The corporate media often gives facts, lies, and spin equal weight, which gives the right wing hate machine the cover they need to keep on assassinating the character of the opposition.

As George W. Bush and his flying monkeys move in to start another conflict--this time with Iran, the corporate media will continue to keep its collective head, up it’s collective ass…and we’ll all pay the price.


More background:

More info on John Edwards’ so-called Bloggers ‘Controversy’.
Barack Obama smear tactics.

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