John McCain's April Fools photo op in a Baghdad market.

Media Spin, Limited Hangout, and the Melting of the American Mind
2007-04-10

When political debate in the US lies between "Should Gonzales stay or go?" or "Should we send 30,000 more troops in Iraq or not?", with no mention of impeachment and jail time for the Bush gang, you know there's a problem. The Signs editors look at a recent editorial page in USA Today and are shocked at how far political discourse has deteriorated... and it takes a lot to shock us!


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We spend a lot of time gathering the news from many sources here at SOTT. We go all over the world via the Internet to bring the news to our readers. Of course, you won't find much, if anything, from Fox News, and very little from sources like USA Today, the "national" newspaper in the US of A. We can't get Fox TV so we are spared the most outrageous of the propaganda and brainwashing.

Every once in awhile, however, a real newspaper from the axis of evil falls into our hands. So it happened that a couple of days ago, we came across the Easter weekend edition of USA Today. We were so astonished by the lies and subterfuges it contains that we were inspired to do a podcast.

On the editorial page, we find the title: "Today's debate: How the surge is going".

Sounds promising, right? In response to the growing calls for a US exit from Iraq, drugstore fly-boy-by-night George W. decided to do the opposite and send an extra 30,000 poor blacks, latinos, and white boys from the wrong side of the tracks to Iraq to ensure that freedom wins. The media spin doctors have labelled this increase in troops, blood and violence "the surge". USA Today, never one to shy away from a phoney debate, promises to give both sides of the story. The debate to end all debates. Well, we deal with this in greater detail in the podcast, but I can't let pass a couple of comments made by the "pro" side of the debate, representative Mike Pence, who was with John McCain last week for the photo op at the Baghdad market. Remember while reading these comments that they are the arguments from the pro-Bush side of the debate.

Pence writes:
"We have a long way to go in Iraq. There is tough, difficult work ahead of us. But we are making progress, and there is reason for cautious optimism about President Bush's surge."
"Cautious optimism"??? Things are so bad that the lackeys defending the Bush "surge" can do no better than tell us there is reason for "cautious optimism"?!?! Are we soon to be told that "there is light at the end of the tunnel", the famous phrase used by the Nixon administration to justify the continued carnage during the Vietnam war?

The good representative, elected to office by the people of Indiana, who describes himself as a "Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order", offers up a couple of bits of evidence to back up his hopeful claim for "cautious optimism".
"Despite all you see and hear in the media, there is a springtime of hope beginning in Iraq."
Springtime of hope in Iraq?!?!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany/
Winter for Poland and France
is more like it, as the Mel Brooks' song from The Producers puts it... But what is really sinister is his placing of the blame on "the media". The media are lying about what is happening in Iraq. There is lots of good news! They just aren't reporting it! The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the news that the US media isn't reporting about Iraq would be the real numbers of deaths of Iraqi civilians, now close to 1 million since the invasion and occupation started. Add to that the million killed during the years of the embargo, mostly children, under the Democrats, and you've got both US parties responsible for killing 2 million Iraqis since 1991. But, somehow, I don't think that even a scoundrel like Pence would openly admit that these deaths are the good news to which he was referring.

So what kind of good news does he have in mind?

You're not gonna believe these....
"From the moment of our arrival, I could sense that things were different. Gen. David Petraeus met us at the airport, and, instead of boarding helicopters to the Green Zone, we drove into town. I hadn't done this since my first trip several years ago."
The man's a bloodsucking idiot. If he'd been alive in Germany under Hitler, he'd have been praising his Furher and the "freedom" brought to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

What kind of person could wax nostalgic over those heartwarming and heady early days of the occupation when the infrastructure of the country was destroyed and US moneymen took control of the country? Oh, yeah. I forgot. They also toppled a statue of Saddam. Hooray! Unfortunately, while Pence can now drive into the heavily fortified Green Zone and feel like the clock has been turned back to the good old days, none of the Iraqi dead will rise up out of the graves and return to their families. None of the US soldiers killed to implement the imperialist dream will come back to life either. But for the pathocrats, we're all just cannon fodder.

Well, if Pence's trip throught the streets of Baghdad in armoured vehicles rather than via helicopter isn't enough evidence for continued hope and trust in the Great Leader's Surge, how about this:
"Along with a squad of military security, we spent more than an hour at a bustling, open air marketplace. While we were instructed to leave our bulletproof vests on, Gen. Petraeus took off his helmet and urged us to leave our helmets in the vehicles."
Hallyluuuujah! "Hey, Ma! I took off my helmet in Baghdad! Aren't I a brave boy?!"

Did he mention the three Apache attack helicopters hovering over the market? Did he mention the sharpshooters on the rooftops and the 100 heavily armed Marine troop on the ground? Well, sure. "Military security" covers that, right?

It truly boggles the mind. How can people like Pence get away with such glaring paramoralisms and outright stupidities? Is there no one left in the media in the United States to point out that not only does the emperor not have any clothes, but he has no brains either? And I'm not talking about making jokes about the intellectual faculties or lack thereof of Bush. There's plenty of that. But to what ends? All it does is reinforce the buffers while nothing changes. People can pump themselves up because they are smarter than the president, but then they roll back over to sleep and think that the political process will somehow put things right in the 2008 presidential elections.

Wake up, people! It isn't a joke. The United States is the aggressor. If you are an American, you are the aggressor. The United States is the bad guy. You are the bad guy. The United States and its allies are the Axis of Evil. It isn't Iran. It isn't North Korea. It isn't Russia. It isn't any of the bogeymen erected as strawmen to be taken down in the puff pieces for imperialist agression that pass for editorials or opinion pieces like that written by Pence. It is you. You are the new Nazis. You are the German people condoning and benefiting from violence and aggression committed in your name against innocent people.

The people of Iraq have every right to fight against the occupier, YOU, in the same way the Poles had the right to fight against the Nazis. The resistence in Iraq is legitimate, and any American who isn't fighting against the policies of his government is complicit in the crimes. There is no neutral position in the fight against the pathocracy. There is no sitting on the fence, no standing on the sidelines. You either stand up for what is right, live by conscience, or you are part of the problem. There is no excuse.

If there is a future, you are going to be judged by your grandchildren. They will ask you what you did. They will ask you how it was that Bush and his pathological buddies were able to subvert the US constitution. They will ask you why you did nothing while innocents were tortured and brutalized in detention camps that span the globe. They will ask you how it was that you couldn't see the, oh, so obvious lies that were told to justify this violence and aggression, not the first time after 9/11, not the second time for Iraq, and not the third time for Iran.

What will you have to say for yourself?