General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Regarding MSNBC [View all]Moral Compass
(1,477 posts)I've never forgotten. What so many fail to see is that MSNBC adroitly straddles the fence, but if you distill it all down they always adhere to the corporate/security state narrative. One has to travel out of the country and just pick up a few publications to realize that everything we hear and read has a slant. At that time, the slant was that we were going into Iraq because, by God!, we were going into Iraq. Hans Blix couldn't be given time to show the world that those chemical weapons (which even if Sadam had had he couldn't have delivered to the U.S.) didn't exist because we were going to go in.Period. End of sentence. The U.S. had decided to wage unprovoked war. Again. We were going to go in with all guns blazing because we were going to go in, dammit! It was an elegant tautology.
The MSM, as we now call them, willingly and enthusiastically beat the drums of war. MSNBC was no exception. Chris Matthews, a supposed liberal Democrat, was the loudest and the most enthusiastic proponent of the Iraq war. At times, he made Fox seem measured and moderate.
These are the United States we live in. The press is no longer the 4th Estate, but is part of the apparatus of the national security state. They know very well what side their bread is buttered on.
What doesn't fit the narrative of the moment is disappeared. Anyone that has done any writing and taken a basic writing class knows that the narrative is crafted as much by what is left out as by what is left in.
Martin Bashir had to go because he said something true (albeit very offensive) about someone the power elite finds very useful--Sarah Palin. She distracts with a potent concoction of nativist, populist nonsense.
The whole show--whether Fox, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC...is to distract us from what is really going on. The U.S., at some point during the Cheney administration (I do not say that with tongue in cheek) became a rogue nation. The blatant, deliberate amorality of our national policy and the easily discerned continuity of our brutal realpolitik reveals that our votes ceased counting some time ago.
We, the masses, are to be entertained while we are being robbed of our rights, our wealth, and our souls. A few of us, impotent Cassandras, try to point out what seems to us so very, very obvious...to no avail.
The truth is that you and me and everyone that posts here and on any site has to continue to live and we cannot muck with the power any more than any mere laborer can afford to buck the master.
We should all go back and read the powerful writings of the late, and very lamented Joe Baegant who spoke eloquently about how we're all caught in the hologram and cannot escape. At the end of his days, I believe he had lost all hope because we are as a people glued to our electronic input devices like fetal marsupials riding in their mother's warm pouch with their mouths glued to her life giving teat.
The elite fear us because we so many, but as long they provide us with bread and circus and the illusion that there are two sides to every issue (when, in actuality, there is always only one consensus) then all remains the same. We are not privy to the workings of power. We are just to go to work and then go home and play with our phones, wield electronic weapons on electronic battlefields against electronic enemies, and watch whatever pap is spewing from our screens. As long as that continues we are safely inert.
Move along, move along...nothing to see here. As long as we are just subsisting we are their pawns and slaves. All the rest, on MSNBC or Fox, is just part of the show. Sit back and enjoy.