November 2023 Propaganda Report: 60 Minutes Strikes Again...and Again...and Again!

Now that I’ve begun to dip my toes back into the cesspool of propaganda, I’m once again coming to the grim realization that I don’t have to walk far to find those putrid waters.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I stumbled upon an episode of the CBS dinosaur 60 Minutes and was shocked/amused at how shamelessly it peddled propaganda against Russia, China and Iran, no doubt in the hopes of convincing gullible Americans into believing some Manichean ideal about us being the good guys, and them being the bad guys, and how we must righteously annihilate them in a world war.

In the weeks that followed, 60 Minutes has kept up its relentless propaganda pace with astounding consistency. In fact, since 60 Minutes started its 56th season on September 17, 2023, over the course of eleven episodes the show has run an astonishing twelve segments either directly or tangentially accusing Russia, China and/or Iran of various evils and nefariousness. This relentless cavalcade of propaganda pieces has been entirely devoid of nuance or journalistic integrity, filled with false assumptions, decidedly one-sided, egregiously vacuous and transparently contrived.

The 60 Minutes episode from November 12th is a perfect example of the type of vapid-to-the-point-of-inane propaganda now common place in American media. The topic on this episode was…shock of shocks…the evil of those nefarious Iranians and Russians!! How original.

The first segment was about an alleged Iranian government program to kill or kidnap American officials, citizens and Iranian dissidents on U.S. soil, which is a nmcie companion piece to the 60 Minutes segment I previously wrote about which dealt with an Iranian-American arrested for espionage in Iran, who was eventually part of a recent prisoner swap.

Leslie Stahl, sporting her trademark physics-defying hairstyle that is best described as Andy Warhol run through a nuclear Cuisinart and a turbo wind tunnel, started off the festivities by reading a list of U.S. officials allegedly targeted. The list included such world-class asshats as Mike Esper, Mike Pompeo and to top it all off, John fucking Bolton.

Bolton and Stahl sat down for one of the more contrived sequences in 60 Minutes history, which is quite an accomplishment, and Bolton, as is his wont, talked tough while looking like a constipated Seussian character. Bolton is one of the more blood-thirsty and maniacal hawks in recent U.S. history, again…quite an accomplishment, and he is completely devoid of any credibility on issues revolving around Iran, Russia, China, the Middle East, Europe, Asia or anywhere else in the world, but Stahl, of course, lapped up his braggadocio bullshit and never once pushed back against his false bravado or his claims…nor did she…you know…show any actual evidence to back up the FBI’s claims of an Iranian kidnap/assassination program.

Stahl then interviewed Masi Alinejad, an Iranian dissident woman living in Brooklyn whom the FBI claims was targeted by this Iranian kidnapping/assassination plot.

Alinejad came to the U.S. fourteen years ago and has been an outspoken advocate for women in Iran, and routinely confers with women in Iran and posts videos online of them not wearing a headscarf in defiance of Iranian religious law.

To be kind, Alinejad comes across as absolutely batshit crazy. She is hyper emotional and seems like the type of person you’d see wandering the streets of Brooklyn talking to neighborhood squirrels while wearing an ornate Kentucky Derby hat and a vintage wedding dress.

Alinejad shared her story of how Iran hired an Azerbaijani man in New York to buy a gun and track down Alinejad, then kidnap her and take her to Iran for trial.

Stahl’s reaction to this story is as revealing as it is pretty funny, as she says it “sounds implausible”. No shit Leslie…maybe it “sounds implausible” because it is, in fact, implausible.

Apparently, the kidnap plot against Alinejad crumbles and so the Iranians pivoted and told this criminal from Azerbaijan to skip the kidnapping and just kill her. The criminal allegedly stalks her, then goes up to her front door and “tries to get in” her house.

What’s weird about this claim of this guy trying to break in to Alinejad’s house is that 60 Minutes shows door cam footage of him on her porch meant to prove the claim, but the video doesn’t show him actually trying to get in to her house at all…in fact he never touches the door. He wanders back on forth on the porch looking at his phone, like a delivery man wondering if he has the wrong address. If there was footage of him actually trying to break in, which would be pretty damning…60 Minutes would’ve shown it. But apparently, they don’t because they didn’t.

According to the story, the alleged assassin then leaves…apparently because he couldn’t get in the house – no doubt held back by the fact that he never touched the door, and then is pulled over by cops for “running a stop sign”, and the police find a rifle in the trunk of his car.

Let’s unpack this shall we…the guy has a weapon, which the FBI alleges he was going to use to kill Alinejad at the behest of Iran, but for some inexplicable reason he decides not to take the weapon with him when he goes to kill her and ends up just standing around like a dope on her porch. What was he going to do, meet her, introduce himself and then tell her to hold on while he runs to his car and gets his rifle?

Also, never believe coincidences in cases like this. This guy wasn’t pulled over by the cops by happenstance…he was marked and everyone knew what he was doing. A strong indicator of this is that if you or I run a stop sign, the police are not going to search the trunk of our car. They will give you a ticket and that will be that. This is why I assume that this alleged assassin from Azerbaijan was actually either an intelligence agency asset or an informant of some kind, and that the entire plot was manufactured by the feds.

Now why would I assert such a crazy thing? Well because this 60 Minutes story also reveals that the man who allegedly wanted to kidnap or kill John Bolton hired a hitman online (yeah…ok) and that hitman wasn’t really a hitman…he was…you guessed it…an FBI informant.

The FBI has lots of informants and they get up to lots of nefarious stuff for their fed paymasters. For example, that 2020 kidnap plot against Michigan governor Whitmer…the vast majority of people involved were actually working for the FBI. If you look at many big-name cases, particularly in the wake of 9-11, the same is true. Hell, at the very least two of the 9-11 hijackers were living with an FBI informant in San Diego right before the attacks.

So, take all of this nonsense from the FBI and 60 Minutes about a vast Iranian assassination/kidnap plot with a gigantic grain of salt.

That said, governments and their intelligence agencies do kidnap and kill citizens of other countries. You know how I know that? Because 60 Minutes unironically shows a video in this segment where an Iranian citizen confesses to assisting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard with their kidnapping and assassination program. The Iranian man, a smuggler who was allegedly given carte blanch in his illegal business if he cooperated with the Revolutionary Guard, confesses in a video MADE BY ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS IN THE BACK OF A CAR AFTER THESE SAME ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS KIDNAPPED AND FORCEFULLY INTERROGATED THE GUY. Ms. Stahl fails to recognize the irony of using a confession video obtained through an Israeli kidnapping plot to prove the villainy of Iranians for their kidnapping plots.

Speaking of other governments kidnapping people…that sounds sort of like…I don’t know… the U.S. government rendition program under the Bush regime.

And speaking of assassinations of other country’s government officials…that sounds a lot like the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Not to mention the cavalcade of scientists assassinated in Iran by Israeli intelligence in the last decade.

Stahl does bring up the Soleimani assassination but fails to see any similarities as the Iranian General was a “terrorism mastermind”. As always, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder, as U.S. foreign policy over the last 75 years has killed and terrorized infinitely more people, especially Iranian people, than the “terrorist” Soleimani could ever dream of matching. Bolton, Pompeo and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration are at a minimum, equals to Soleimani on the terrorism chart.

Speaking of dead Iranians…does anybody remember the 290 Iranian murdered by the U.S. in 1988 when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iranian Air flight 655 over Iranian airspace? Well…I’m sure Iranians do, and they probably think of it as a terror attack. The George H.W. Bush was president at the time and he refused to apologize to Iran because America never apologizes….typical terrorists behavior.

Stahl goes on to recount the FBI allegations against Iran saying that in order to keep a legal distance, Iran uses “proxies” from the criminal world to do their dirty work.

This sounds quite similar to how the U.S. intelligence community uses criminals to run guns and drugs into the U.S. from Central and South America in order to fund their black budget projects…like, ironically enough, Iran-Contra.

It is also similar to how prior to the war in Afghanistan, poppy production in that country under Taliban rule had fallen to nearly zero…but after we went on the hunt for Bin Laden by starting a war there, poppy production skyrocketed, followed by a flood of heroin into the U.S. and Europe. The same thing happened during Vietnam, when the CIA would run heroin from Thailand through Vietnam and into the U.S. Not surprisingly, Leslie Stahl didn’t bring any of this uncomfortableness up.

Also not surprisingly, when Stahl spoke of Iran using proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah to fight their wars and foment dissent in other countries, she failed to mention how the U.S. has famously used such stand-up good guys as Al Qaeda and ISIS as proxies in the Middle East against various enemies, such as the old Soviet Union and modern-day Syria.

60 Minutes’ allergy to the truth and addiction to establishment propaganda didn’t stop with the inane Iranian kidnapping story. Up next on the same episode was even more WWIII drum banging in the form of a story about Russia’s “cultural genocide” in Ukraine.

In a previous episode, 60 Minutes did a segment about Russia’s “quiet invasion” in Georgia and now they’re doing a segment on Russia’s “cultural genocide”…how sneaky of those Russians to do “quiet” invasions and “cultural” genocides, instead of those noisy invasions and actual genocides like Israel is doing in Gaza.

The main thrust of this segment was that Russia is targeting Ukrainian churches, libraries and museums in order to wipe out Ukrainian culture and identity.

The specifics of the charges against Russia in this case are…well…almost irrelevant considering the dubious sources with incentive to manufacture any story they want with no journalistic resistance to it. That said, I don't doubt in the least that churches, libraries and museums have been destroyed in Ukraine.

What I find fascinating though is that as this story aired another war is raging…this time in Gaza, and lots of churches, including the third oldest Christian church in the world, St. Porphyrius, and hospitals too, have been deliberately targeted, as have civilians.

You can bet your ass that 60 Minutes will not run a story on the cultural genocide of Christians by Israel…and that’s because when Israel commits cultural genocide, or any other kind of genocide, it’s good, but when Russia does it, it’s bad.

To be fair, it isn’t just Israel that gets a free pass…we give a free pass to ourselves as well. Remember when the Iraqi museum under U.S. military control was looted during the Iraq War, and Donald Rumsfeld’s response was to scoff at the charges and then to declare that “stuff happens”?

I certainly do not condone Russia’s military destroying Ukrainian churches, museums and libraries, nor do I condone their alleged looting. But I must say that these charges would be more impactful if western media outlets hadn’t already run with vacuous accusations of Russian rape camps and massacres, both of which have been shown to be scurrilous charges and empty propaganda talking points.

What I find so deplorable about establishment media’s modern war coverage is, whether it be in Ukraine, Syria, or Israel, the manufacturing and hyping of false atrocity stories.

War is bad enough as it is that you don’t need to gin up phony furor over fake rape camps or beheaded babies and the like. War is an atrocity all its own, it doesn’t need any help. And frankly, these stories only further to coarsen and dehumanize the public…which is already pretty coarse and inhumane.

The following Sunday, November 19th, 60 Minutes kept the propaganda train rolling with a segment titled “The Disappeared”, which was a shameless appeal to emotion that was so devoid of journalistic integrity as to be egregious.

The segment told the story of how Russia is “abducting” Ukrainian children from Ukraine and taking them into Russia. 60 Minutes reports that according to the Ukrainian government, the “official” number of children “abducted” by Russia is 19,000 but that they think the “real” number is 300,000…that’s quite a range…one might even say it is “highly improbable”. Just so everyone knows, 60 Minutes makes abundantly clear throughout the segment that all of this “abducting” is a “war crime”.

The story follows a “brave” Ukrainian grandmother, named Paulina, as she “rescues” her nine-year-old grandson Nikita who was “abducted” by the Russians. This story is…ummm…complicated to say the least.

So, Paulina’s grandson Nikita has special needs and was attending a boarding school for disabled students in Ukraine. His parents are completely out of the picture, but why that is, is never revealed in the story, we only learn that the grandmother is “in the process of filing for guardianship of her grandson”. Curious considering that Nikita was “abducted” nearly 8 months ago…which indicates he had no family member as his guardian prior to the “abduction”.  

Also curious is that Paulina lives far away (in Poland) from Nikita, as she works and has to pay for the boarding school….or so 60 Minutes tells us. The reality is that Paulina hasn’t seen Nikita in a long time and it has nothing to do with the Russians. In fact, she is in such close contact with Nikita that she only finds out he has been “abducted” by the Russians, when his picture is posted on social media by a Ukrainian activist group.

The host of the segment, Cecilia Vega, then informs us that over the seven months Nikita was “held captive”, the Russians played a “cruel game of hide and seek”, moving the child three times in eight months.

In an attempt to expose the villainy of the Russians, a digital map is used to show the long journey Nikita was taken on “post-abduction”. First, he is taken out of Ukraine to Crimea, then to Russia proper – but still close to the border, and then…astonishingly…he is taken back to Ukraine not all that far from where he was originally “abducted”. Cecilia Vega’s voice-over sums up this journey by simply declaring that the child was taken “deep into Russian-held territory”.

Paulina then works with an activist group in Ukraine dedicated to “rescuing” the children “abducted” by Russia, and they hatch a plot to get Paulina to Nikita.

We are told by a former Ukrainian politician who now runs the non-profit activist organization that “rescues” these children, that each child who returns to Ukraine is :a witness to a war crime”…which is a strange thing to say since it will just signal to Russia not to release any more children…right? Ms. Vega never asks that question because it would complicate the shallow sound-bite she is so eager to get and the Manichean narrative she has pledged to uphold and propagate.

Then we hear about Vlad, a 16-year-old Ukrainian boy, who recounts his tale of being taken from his home in Ukraine by Russian soldiers and put in a “camp”, which sounds an awful lot like a school. Among the tortures he endures are that he has to say the Russian national anthem every morning (the horror!!).

Vlad also tells us that speaking Ukrainian was forbidden in the “camp”, which means he got to experience exactly what every ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizen experienced after the U.S.-led coup in 2014 in Ukraine. The post-coup government banned the Russian language, Russian media outlets, opposition political parties and even Russian Orthodox Churches…and some Ukrainian ones too.

Vlad, being a teenager, lashes out at these ridiculous restrictions and tears down a Russian flag in anger. He is then put in the detention facility part of the “camp” and is held in “isolation”. 60 Minutes acts like this is the most barbaric thing to have ever occurred, and I concur, that children, even 16-year-olds, should not be put in isolation. Unfortunately, in the U.S. 35% of all prisoners held in youth detention facility are held in isolation at one point during their incarceration. Celia Vega never mentions that fact.

Vega did mention that the Russians were “indoctrinating” children in these “camps” by telling them “repeated lies” like “Ukraine lost the war”. By all observable metrics, Ukraine has lost the war though, and the indoctrination charge is pretty rich coming from 60 Minutes – which does nothing more than indoctrinate its viewers with the most pernicious of propaganda.

As for Vlad, his story is a sad one, but he did get back home, so Russia’s “abduction” campaign seems very, very ineffective. Considering that the Ukrainian military routinely “abducts” teens and old men off the street and uses them as forced conscripts, which they then throw into the meat grinder at the front line to be slaughtered, it’s safe to say that Vlad was lucky to be in a Russian school instead.

And that is really the point of all this. The notion that Russia is moving children out of a war zone for the safety of the children is only absurd and ridiculous if you have a cartoonish and comic book understanding of Russia and Russians. You don’t have to think Russians are the good guys to believe that they don’t want to massacre children.

And considering the fact that Israel has slaughtered more civilians and children in just over a month of war in Gaza, than Russia has in two years in Ukraine, speaks to this reality.

Another piece of evidence backing this notion is that Paulina makes it to the school where Nikita is living under Russian control. Despite the fact that she has no legal guardianship of Nikita, Russian officials, including Maria Mlova-Balova – the woman who is “accused of war crimes” by Ukraine (and 60 Minutes) for her work running Russia’s Child Services, Paulina is allowed to leave with Nikita.

Mlova-Belova, or as 60 Minutes identifies her “the accused war criminal”, tears up with joy at the reunion of Paulina and Nikita. Mlova-Belova – “the accused war criminal”, then gives gifts to Nikita and says to Paulina, “would like you like to stay in the Russian Federation with us maybe? We can give you some money, maybe a car?”

Paulina declines, as Mlova-Belova calls the reunion a “joy” and wishes Paulina and Nikita a “happy life”. Paulina and Nikita then leave for the long journey back to Poland.

Just think about this for a moment…Mlova-Belova –“the accused war criminal”, greets a Ukrainian grandmother with gifts and an offer of citizenship and financial aid, and then allows her to come take her grandson and leave, despite the fact that the Ukrainian government official running the rescue operation says every returned child is a witness to a war crime, and this “war criminal” woman puts the entire interaction on video and shares it with the world.

Does this sound like some nefarious, child-stealing enterprise being run by a “war criminal”? Does Maria Mlova-Belova sound like a monster who wants to harm Ukrainian children? In addition to that, is a nine-year-old boy with special needs some great prized possession or piece of war booty the Russians covet? Or is the more likely scenario that Mlova-Belova is a Russian bureaucrat doing her best to find a safe place or safe home for children in great peril in a very complex and difficult situation? We know what 60 Minutes wants you to think, but the facts of this scenario speak to a much more nuanced and complicated situation.

(This is not to even mention the fact that as this story ran, Israel is waging war in Gaza and making no effort to avoid killing many, many children – according to some reports, over 5,500. It would seem Russia is doing a much more humane thing by removing children from an active war zone. I’ll let you decide.)

On Sunday, November 26th, 60 Minutes ran yet another propaganda segment titled “Rise”, which was about a former American Marine Corps officer who runs a program which brings Ukrainian war widows and their children to the Swiss Alps for a week in order to climb mountains and confront their psychological trauma of having lost a husband/father.

The segment was hosted by a weepy, teary-eyed Scott Pelley, who introduced us to Nathan Schmidt, the former Marine who served three brutal tours in Iraq and has the psychological scars to prove it.

Pelley repeats the terms “Putin’s invasion” and “Putin’s unprovoked invasion” like mindless mantras throughout the segment, just so everyone knows that subtlety and nuance are not welcome on 60 Minutes, despite those declarative condemnations being, at best, disputed. To state aloud that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is to prove yourself uninformed to the point of illiteracy in the recent history of Ukraine and America’s involvement.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Schmidt, who is so obviously torn up about what he witnessed and experienced in Iraq, helping Ukrainians heal from the psychological wounds of war, when the Iraqis, whose country he invaded, are apparently left to fend for themselves when it comes to dealing with the immense trauma, he and his nation inflicted upon them.

When hearing the very sad stories of the Ukrainian war widows and their children, I couldn’t help but wonder…where are the ethnic Russian Ukrainians who lived in the Donbas who were left widowed and orphaned by the Ukrainian government’s bombardment of thei towns and villages post the 2014 coup – a coup which was instigated and sponsored by the U.S.? Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in the Donbas…so there are lots of war widows and orphans to choose from for a healing mountain climb. Why weren’t they invited?

And where is the healing mountain climbing for the relatives of the 48 ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who were burned alive in the union house in Odessa in 2014 by Ukrainians and backed by the U.S. installed Ukrainian government? I’m sure they’d like to climb a mountain and forget their troubles too.

This 60 Minutes segment is the heartstrings portion of the propaganda program, similar to the previous segment on the “disappeared” children. It is meant to overwhelm you with raw emotion, which will short circuit your brain and your critical thinking ability. Facts? We don‘t need facts! We need feelings!!

The thing that bothers me the most about this wave of 60 Minutes propaganda pieces is not the shamelessness, but the obvious venality, vacuity and malignant intent of it all.

This 60 Minutes anti-Russian/China/Iran propaganda isn’t meant to inform, it is meant to inflame. Its goal is to misinform, disinform and blind the populace to reality and dull their ability to think critically while aggravating their emotions, all in the hopes of ginning up support for a massive war against the new Axis of Evil.

War is undoubtedly a racket, and 60 Minutes is a critical part of that racket’s infrastructure. The dupes and dopes who buy into the bullshit that 60 Minutes and the neo-con American government are peddling, will ride the wave of their incuriosity and righteousness, and flag-wave us into a world war and our own annihilation.

I know Quixotically waving my red warning flags will make no difference in the long run and will do nothing to stop the inevitable, but at least it gives me something to do while the dogs of war howl louder and louder and 60 Minutes keeps the beat by incessantly banging their war drums.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

America: The Motion Picture - A Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes and 22 seconds

America: The Motion Picture is so stupid it actually thinks it’s smart, just like the country it parodies.

The movie is dreadful and relentlessly unfunny, but it’s unintentionally a perfect representation of the clownshow that is modern American culture.

America: The Motion Picture is a new animated feature film on Netflix that parodies the founding fathers and the American revolution.

The film, directed by Matt Thompson and written by Dave Callahan, boasts a stellar voice cast of Channing Tatum, Bobby Moynihan, Will Forte, Olivia Munn, Simon Pegg and Andy Samberg among many others, and some imaginative animation.

But the most distinguishing feature of America: The Motion Picture is also the most distinguishing feature of the country whose founding it parodies, and that is its condescending, blindly arrogant belief that it’s so smart despite the obvious fact that it’s so egregiously, relentlessly stupid.

Just to give you a taste of the absurdity and idiocy on display in this film, here’s a brief rundown of the plot.

George Washington and Abe Lincoln are best friends, and when Benedict “Cosby” Arnold, who is a werewolf, slaughters the signers of the Declaration of Independence, steals the document, and then murders Lincoln at the Ford Theatre, Washington vows revenge and to stop the British Empire from taking over the world.  Oh, and Washington has chainsaws that pop out of his arm like a founding father Wolverine when he does battle.

Washington then gets his team together, which include Geronimo, Thomas Edison – who is a Chinese woman, Sam Adams – who is a party hound frat bro, and Paul Revere – who is friendless and quite possibly a human/horse hybrid, to fight back.  

The plot staggers around like a drunken hobo from one extraordinary inanity, like King James coming to America on the Titanic to finish his super weapon, to another, like Paul Bunyan boxing with Big Ben as double decker buses transform into Imperial Walkers.

Of course, that all sounds incredibly stupid, but the stupidity is the point. The filmmakers are trying to not only make a parody of the American myth, but also satirize the historical ignorance of the viewing population.

As intentionally absurd as the plot of America: The Motion Picture is, the joke is that there are probably lots of people who will think, Washington’s Wolverine chainsaw hands aside, that it’s somewhat true, no doubt duped by the official “based on actual history” tag that opens the movie.

Polls show that only four out of ten Americans would have enough knowledge of history to pass an American citizenship test. The only state in the country that has a majority of residents who’d pass the citizenship test is…Vermont, and I’d be willing to bet a majority of Americans don’t even know Vermont exists.

The problem with America: The Motion Picture isn’t its endless adolescent humor, which includes a plethora of sex jokes, gay sex jokes and inter-species sex jokes, or that it makes fun of the founding fathers, anyone sensitive about sacred cows like Washington and Lincoln being comedically desecrated is ridiculous, but that it’s so condescending enough to think that only the “other side” is filled with ignoramuses.

This bias, which caricatures only the American myth believing fools, flag wavers and rednecks who spontaneously sing the national anthem at Walmart as the idiots, is the movie’s glaring ideological blindspot.

Yes, those that buy into the star-spangled myth are, in my opinion, worthy of being mocked, as they often reflexively take a short cut to thinking and buy into America’s militarism and belligerent foreign policy, and adorn themselves with buffoonish bumper sticker slogans like “these colors don’t run” and “love it or leave it”.

But let’s not kid ourselves, no side in the American cultural and political landscape has a monopoly on stupid. Too cool for school liberals are just as moronic as their conservative counterparts.

For example, it was liberals who screeched about Trump’s “war on the press” but then cheered Julian Assange’s imprisonment and torture. It was the liberals in the media that shouted down any talk of the lab leak theory as racist. It was liberal medical professionals and scientists who declared that gathering in crowds during Covid lockdown was deadly, unless it was to protest for Black Lives Matter. It’s woke liberal jackasses who think the solution to their imagined pandemic of anti-black racism is to force everyone to identify with their race – even though America is an overwhelmingly white country. It’s these same liberals that over-estimate police killings of black people by over 10x, 100x and some even 1,000x the actual rate.

And remember, it was the majority of Americans, both left and right, that, unlike me, wholeheartedly embraced the disastrous and murderous Iraq War, Reagan and Clinton’s financialization of the economy and free trade - which gutted the working and middle class, and who fell for not only Bush’s normalizing trade relations with China but also his post 9-11 War on Terror scaremongering, as well as Barack Obama’s smoke and mirrors marketing campaign known as Hope and Change.

The bottom line is that while Covid has slowed down, the pandemic of stupidity in America is accelerating at an astonishing rate across party, ideological, racial and class lines.

As for the dopey America: The Motion Picture, it’s a perfect representation of America because it’s so stupid it thinks it’s smart. By the way, the movie isn’t just dumb, it’s dreadful and gratingly unfunny, so like American lectures on “exceptionalism” and “democracy”, you can skip it. You’d be better served watching Mike Judge’s prescient 2006 film Idiocracy, which at this point feels like a documentary.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Cosby and Rumsfeld - Perfect Symbols of Degenerate America

Cosby is getting out of prison and Rumsfeld is dead, but like America, they’ll never regain their veneer of moral authority.

The once beloved comedian and the once adored Secretary of Defense, are the perfect representations of America’s hypocritical, corrupt, deceptive and destructive culture.

It’s telling that American icon Bill Cosby, the comedy superstar who went from beloved tv dad to reviled convicted rapist, had his rape conviction thrown out on a technicality on the same day Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration on 9-11 and during the Iraq War, who was the ultimate Washington establishmentarian, died.

Cosby, who was accused by 53 women of drugging and raping them, and Rumsfeld, who oversaw the murder of millions in the Middle East and the U.S. torture regime, seem to have avoided being punished for their egregious crimes, when state supreme court of Pennsylvania overturned Cosby’s conviction and Rumsfeld, who never faced any charges for his litany of war crimes, died of cancer in New Mexico.

Cosby and Rumsfeld seem to me to be a perfect representation of America and its diabolically twisted culture.

The only reason Cosby was able to prey upon women, and long evaded his comeuppance, was because he had deceptively created a role for himself as the safest man in America – the nation’s dad, the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Rumsfeld painted himself as a patriot and then did everything in his power to undermine American democracy with his embrace of the “unitary executive” philosophy, and wreak havoc across the globe in the name of spreading democracy.

Cosby’s massively successful, curse-free, soft edged stand-up comedy routines of the 1960’s led him to be a spokesman for such family friendly brands as Coke and Jell-O, and to equally clean roles in film and tv, most notably as the creator and voice of the 1970’s kid’s cartoon Fat Albert, and Cliff, the ugly sweater wearing patriarch of the Huxtable family on the 1980’s smash hit tv series, The Cosby Show.

Cosby, who would be the first to tell you he had a Doctorate of Education from the University of Massachusetts, a fact highlighted every week in the credits of The Cosby Show, also wrote books with titles like “Fatherhood”, “Love and Marriage” and “Childhood” to further reinforce his persona of being a gentle, loving dad.

Rumsfeld, who never failed to remind the fawning media that he was a military pilot in his younger days, was a major player in the Nixon, Ford and first Bush administration, and brought his insidious establishment powers to bear on the hapless wonder that was George W. Bush.

Of course, while Cosby was wearing the Dr. Jekyll mask of corporate American sainthood shilling for Coke and Jell-O and mugging for the camera on The Cosby Show, he was actually Mr. Hyde drugging and raping women. And while Rumsfeld was dazzling the media with his supposed military brilliance during the Iraq War, America was systematically torturing people, gutting Iraq and losing the war.

And now Cosby is going to walk because he was wealthy, the victim was greedy, the former prosecutor was deferential to the rich and powerful and the current prosecutor was blinded by emotion amidst the panic of the #MeToo movement, and Rumsfeld is going to avoid his comeuppance because the media adore dead establishmentarians and immediately cleanse all of their bad deeds from public memory.

This is why Cosby and Rumsfeld are such perfect representations of America.

Like America, which talks incessantly of peace but only makes war and touts democracy but deplores popular movements, Cosby and Rumsfeld are voracious predators hiding behind the mask of respectability who lectured the world about their faults but were oblivious to the cancer metastasized in their own soul.

And in the most American way possible, Cosby used his great wealth and fame to avoid accountability for his heinous sins by playing the rich man’s rigged game in a desperately corrupt system, and Rumsfeld avoided being held accountable for his crimes by embedding himself in the untouchable elite of Washington.

Cosby is so American he even became the poster boy for the recent hysteria of the #MeToo era, which was emotionally satisfying to many but is now being exposed as having a legally dubious foundation. This is particularly egregious in the Cosby case considering that it was good old American greed in the form of a payout via a civil suit that derailed the criminal conviction.

Rumsfeld will no doubt have the media slobber all over him and try to exalt him as some great American hero in the next few days. His Iraq War crimes, his failure as Secretary of Defense and as a human being, whitewashed.

Rumsfeld is dead, but Cosby is 83, and like the nation he once so enraptured, is decaying and on his last legs. Cosby and Rumsfeld may never be held accountable for their crimes but, like America, they’ll never escape the stench of their foul behavior. I suppose the silver lining in this ugly situation is that we won’t ever have to watch a self-righteous Donald Rumsfeld lecture us on “known unknowns” or watch Bill Cosby sell us Jell-O ever again because Rumsfeld and Cosby, like America, have forever lost their fabricated veneer of moral authority, not death, an overturned conviction or media self-deception, is going to bring that back.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Media Lie...Even About Peppa Pig

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

THE MALIGNANTLY MENDACIOUS MEDIA ARE SLANDERING POOR PEPPA PIG BY CLAIMING THE SHOW IS SHOCKINGLY VIOLENT

Not even kiddies’ favourite Peppa Pig is safe from media excess, with major outlets claiming that it is shockingly violent. But unraveling the details of this curious story gives clear insight into how deceptive the mainstream media can be.

The media are deliberately misrepresenting a study to stoke a panic over alleged violence in the children’s animated show Peppa Pig. Across the political spectrum the headlines have been absurdly alarming. “ASSAULT ON PEPPA: Peppa Pig and Disney’s Frozen are too violent for Children, experts claim” shrieks the right-wing The Sun, while the left-wing The Independent breathlessly declares, “Peppa Pig: Experts Find Shocking Levels of Violence in Children’s TV Show”.

According to the media it isn’t just Peppa but also Daniel Tiger, The Octonauts, Paw Patrol as well as Toy Story 3 and 4, Frozen, Finding Dory and a handful of other kid shows and movies supposedly deemed too violent.

As a vigilant and diligent parent of a young child that routinely watches Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, The Octonauts and Daniel Tiger, I find these headlines and their revelations alarming.

The Sun’s and The Independent’s headlines had me deeply concerned that I was allowing my child to be exposed to violent and damaging material via Peppa Pig.

I myself have watched countless hours of these shows with my child and found them to be rather benign and good-hearted children’s programs, so I wanted to learn more about the ‘shocking violence’ that experts discovered of which I was apparently blissfully blind.

According to The Independent, “A new study looking into violence featured in animated series and films found that more than eight moments of pain and brutality were inflicted across a selected range of entertainment aimed at children.”

As I read The Independent story further though, a bunch of red flags popped up. For example, the thin article made a bizarre shift in its closing three paragraphs when it dropped the violence angle altogether in order to inform readers that actress Harley Bird, who voiced Peppa, recently stepped down from the role after thirteen years. I was expecting to read that Ms. Bird had been brutalized while working on the show or had turned into a violent hooligan, but no, the article just ended with that odd whimper of a factoid.

The biggest red flag of all though was that neither The Sun nor The Independent ever linked to the supposed “study of violence in children’s entertainment” they were referencing, nor did they include the name of the journal in which it was allegedly published.

Being the intrepid non-reporter that I am I did what The Sun and The Independent’s actual reporters hoped readers wouldn’t do…I searched for the report.

Upon finding the study in everybody’s favorite magazine, Pain: The Journal of the International Association of the Study of Pain, I was shocked to learn that not only are Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol and Daniel Tiger not viciously violent shows creating serial killers and sociopaths, but that the “study” in question HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH VIOLENCE.

The study is actually titled “The socio-cultural context of pediatric pain: an examination of the portrayal of pain in children’s popular media”.

The study wasn’t investigating “violence featured in animated series and films” but rather how kid’s entertainment presents pain and reactions to pain on-screen.

The banal study concluded, “A narrow depiction of pain was presented in children's popular media, with an overall underrepresentation of pain, numerous maladaptive portrayals of pain, and gender differences in both sufferer and observer responses.”

That is definitely a less sexy headline than “Assault on Peppa Pig!!”

The British and Canadian researchers behind the study were actually trying to understand how to use the power of children’s entertainment to help kids understand regular, everyday pain, and how to be empathetic.

You wouldn’t know that from The Sun or The Independent’s click-bait headline and lazily reported story, which isn’t just meant to garner ad revenue by deceiving viewers but also to gaslight parents and instill in them a growing sense of fear, as well as further undermine, confuse and conflate common language.

For example, making the terms ‘pain’ and ‘violence’ interchangeable, as both media outlets did in this case, is totally in line with the insidious woke culture that distorts language beyond recognition and brazenly and shamelessly declares that, “silence is violence”.

Trust me when I tell you that silence is not violence. Violence is violence. Only someone who has never been punched in the face will tell you that silence and violence are the same thing.

This Peppa Pig story is just another obvious example of the media’s mischievous and malicious mendacity. One can go through the list of much more egregious media lies that had, or potentially could have, much more catastrophic impact than just besmirching poor Peppa Pig.

For instance, the establishment media’s slavishly slanted coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war, or the propaganda surrounding Syria’s supposed chemical weapons attacks, or the cavalcade of Cold War inspired disinformation regarding Russia…be it alleged interference in the 2016 election, or supposed hacking of power grids, or use of “microwave weapons”.

This manufactured Peppa Pig story is proof that the corporate media aren’t interested in uncovering facts, only in pandering for profit, and that their loyalty is always and every time to money, not to Truth.

The bottom line is this…Peppa Pig is a safe and trustworthy show for kids to watch, but the establishment news outlets of both the left and right are not a safe or trustworthy product for adults to consume.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Joe Biden Has Defeated Trump - Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old Boss

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 07 seconds

Biden’s electoral victory has been met with cheers, proving that gullible Americans are eager to get fooled once again.

A few hours ago I was startled by a collective shout that went out across my neighborhood here in Los Angeles. I had no idea what all the noise was about, but people were making quite an exuberant ruckus. After checking the news I quickly realized the cheers were due to the fact that all the networks were officially calling the presidential race for Joe Biden.

I haven’t heard that much happy screaming since a few weeks ago when the Dodgers won the World Series, and before that when the Lakers won the NBA championship.  It is apropos that Angelinos would cheer Biden’s victory the same way they celebrated their sports team’s titles…as all of these events are nothing but a function of empty tribalism and vacuous emotionalism that in the long run don’t actually mean a damn thing.

For the fools here in the City of Angels celebrating Biden’s victory, nothing will fundamentally change in their lives, for good or for ill. They will still have to step over hordes of homeless people and used needles and human excrement as they navigate this sick, venal, miserable third world shithole trying, and usually failing, to scratch out a living and to make ends meet.

Biden’s rapturously received electoral victory is a vacant win for nothing but a stylistic change. The hysterically happy masses around me are overjoyed because Biden isn’t as much of a boor as Trump, not exactly a high bar. That said, Biden will certainly be more of a bore than Trump. 

On substance, Biden is, like the Orange Man liberals love to loathe, a shameless corporatist who will bend over backwards to fill the coffers of the fat cats in board rooms and on Wall Street, all while screwing over poor, working and middle-class people.

Biden’s ascension to the American throne is akin to the dreadful sitcom Two and a Half Men replacing Charlie Sheen with Ashton Kutcher. The obnoxious Sheen and his “tiger blood” were gone, but the show still really sucked…and Kutcher was annoying jerk in his own right.

As far as Biden replacing Trump goes, for people like me, things will only change on the surface and the sitcom that is American politics will still suck.

For instance, those who think public college should be tuition free for the working class and student debt cancelled, meet Joe Biden, the man who was instrumental in getting a bankruptcy bill passed that made it impossible to discharge student debt, thus damning generations to indentured servitude to pay back school loans over-inflated through government interference.

For people who think we should have universal health care, meet Joe Biden, an architect of Obamacare, that insidious bill written by insurance companies that fleeces Americans by forcing people to buy their abysmal product at exorbitant prices under force of law. Biden, similar to Trump, has even promised to veto any universal health care bill that would ever come to his desk.

For those opposed to Wall Street socializing losses while privatizing gains, meet Joe Biden, who will, like Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump before him, populate his administration with nefarious Wall Street shills and despicable devotees of the Goldman Sachs cult who will hungrily devour any taxpayer bailouts that they can get their hands on. 

For peace loving people who think America should be less militaristic, belligerent and bellicose abroad, meet Joe Biden, the man who voted for the Iraq War that killed millions, and is a poodle to the Pentagon with an itchy trigger finger to get tough with America’s adversaries, be they real or imagined, across the globe.

For those who think the drug war and criminal justice system are an abject failure, meet Joe Biden, the man who wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that has given America the dubious distinction of having the highest prison population rate in the entire world.

For working class folks that have repeatedly gotten screwed by Washington’s corporate friendly free trade policies that decimated the manufacturing base in America and eventually led to the rise of Donald Trump, meet Joe Biden, the NAFTA-loving narcissist who pretends to be a man of the people but is really the lap dog of big money interests.

For those who despised Trump for his war on the press, meet Joe Biden, who was vice president for Obama, the man who waged more than a Trumpian rhetorical war on the press, but an actual war on the press by using the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers more times than every other president in U.S. history combined.

For people outraged by Trump putting “kids in cages” as part of his crackdown on illegal immigration, meet Joe Biden, who was vice president during the Obama administration which aggressively deported more immigrants than Trump and who also put “kids in cages”.

For every emotionally triggered simpleton so gloriously giddy over Trump’s demise and Biden’s rise…meet the new boss….same as the old boss. You are all being fooled. Me…I won’t get fooled again.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America's Delusional Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Like America in the thrall of its contrived American Dream fairy tale, middle-aged Mike Tyson has deluded himself into believing his own hype, while forgetting the reality of his past.

In recent weeks, 53 year-old former Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson has released a series of seconds-long boxing videos that show him slimmed down and throwing crisp punch combinations into the mitts and body protector of his trainer and hinting at a comeback. In typical over-reaction, some Americans immediately responded by declaring that Iron Mike could win the title.

The hysteria surrounding Tyson’s mini-videos is par for the course in the land of the American Dream, where people live in a diabolically delusional culture that loves manufactured “reality shows” but is impervious to reality.

The fact that Tyson hitting pads for ten seconds is not proof of his ring worthiness should be self-evident since, unlike real boxing opponents, the pads aren’t actively trying to avoid getting hit or, more importantly, attempting to render Tyson unconscious.

It also takes a willful ignorance of boxing history and biology to ignore the fact that at the age of 38, Tyson got brutalized in his final fight by journeyman Kevin McBride, and he is not going to be a better boxer at 53 than he was at 38.

America’s magical thinking regarding Tyson is fueled by its pernicious addiction to the narcotic of nostalgia.

The rose colored glass of the rear view mirror has distorted American’s perception of who Tyson really was as a fighter.

Tyson was, unquestionably, one of the most talented boxers and dynamic athletes to ever be heavyweight champ, but the cold, hard truth is that he was never, ever a great fighter.

Tyson became “The Baddest Man on the Planet” and the youngest champion in Heavyweight history, by intimidating and destroying a series of tomato cans in spectacular fashion. But Iron Mike shrunk and withered whenever he went up against any worthy opponent, like Evander Holyfield or Lennox Lewis or even just less talented fighters who weren’t afraid of him, like Buster Douglas.

Tyson was a Wizard of Oz fighter, like the Tin Man, he had no heart, like the Lion he was a coward, and if he does go through with this comeback, he’ll score the hat trick by being as brainless as the Scarecrow.

The current Tyson renaissance reminds me of the recent nostalgia-fueled rehabilitation of George W. Bush by the mainstream media.

Like Tyson and the little gesture of his short videos, all Bush had to do was give candy to Michelle Obama at a public event and he was transformed into a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi, as the media assiduously wiped clean from the American consciousness of all his grievous misdeeds.

The narcotic of nostalgia has forced Americans to forget a plethora of both Tyson’s and Bush’s failings. Like the fact that Iron Mike didn’t take Buster Douglas seriously and got summarily knocked out because of it, just like the lightweight Bush didn’t take seriously warnings about Bin Laden, which resulted in the catastrophe of 9-11 and 2,996 dead.

Or that Tyson bit off more than he could chew…including an ear…in his two humiliating defeats to the lion-hearted Evander Holyfield, which was similar to Bush’s emotionally fueled imperial fever dreams that killed millions in his egregious Iraq War fiasco.

Or that Lennox Lewis badly exposed Tyson’s boxing malfeasance in their lopsided match-up, much like Hurricane Katrina exposed Bush’s true governing incompetence at the cost of 1,833 lives.

Or the humiliation of the last days of their careers, when Tyson fell to the forgettable Danny Williams and Kevin McBride and Bush drove the American economy off the cliff with the housing collapse.

The power of America’s nostalgia induced amnesia is so great that even the moral and ethical atrocities of Tyson’s rape conviction and Bush’s torture and spying programs seem forever lost down the collective memory hole.

Crisis always reveals character, and both Tyson and Bush repeatedly showed their utter lack of it when they needed it most. Meanwhile, intentionally obtuse or cognitively dissonant Americans who deny that fact reveal their own deranged character.

Tyson fanboys on the internet, and Bush cheerleaders in the media, do nothing but reveal their own sycophancy, depravity and lack of integrity when they give voice to their hallucinations and wax nostalgic regarding the alleged halcyon days when Iron Mike ruled the ring and Dubya commanded the West Wing.

The truth is that Americans, in general, and Tyson and Bush fans in particular, can never, and will never, wake up from the delusional, nostalgia-addled, manufactured reality show that is the current American Dream.

The actual reality, that the aging Tyson, a rapist and bully who even at his greatest wasn’t that great, is the perfect symbol of America, a decadent and decrepit empire in steep decline, is much too painful a truth to confront and bear.

On the bright side, if Tyson does come back to fight a real heavyweight and not some fellow geriatric pugilist, he will get knocked out in short order. So, at least he’ll still be able to believe in the contrived fantasy of the American Dream…because as George Carlin once said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you got to be asleep to believe it.”

 A version of this story was originally published at RT.

©2020

Jussie Smollett's Hate Crime Hoax Exposes America's Shocking Skepticism Shortage

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 38 seconds

The Jussie Smollett story is a microcosm of what is wrong with America and the mainstream media.

 “It’s not a lie if you believe it” – George Costanza, Seinfeld

On Thursday, US actor Jussie Smollett was arrested in Chicago after being charged with filing a false police report.

Jussie Smollett, a gay, African-American actor who stars on the hit tv show Empire, claimed that on January 29th he was the victim of a hate crime when two White men hurled racist and homophobic slurs at him, punched, kicked and poured bleach over him, and then put a noose around his neck while taunting him by proclaiming “this is MAGA (Make America Great Again) country”.

Smollett’s story was dubious to some because the idea of two Trumpites out at 2 a.m. in Chicago hunting gay Black men with a noose and bleach in minus 20 degrees weather seems far-fetched…as does the idea that they would be pop-culturally aware enough to have watched Empire and recognize a marginal celebrity like Smollett in the first place.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” – Winston Churchill

In the wake of Smollett’s unusual claims the media uncritically accepted his story and numerous celebrities such as Emma Watson, Katy Perry, Olivia Munn and Ariana Grande tweeted vociferous support. Actress Ellen Page gave a heart felt speech on The Late Show with Colbert laying the blame for Smollett’s attack at the feet of homophobic Vice President Mike Pence.

VIDEO LINK

Democratic presidential hopefuls chimed as well with Kamala Harris and Cory Booker both calling the attack a “modern-day lynching”, and a cavalcade of other politicians who tweeted their unquestioning support for Jussie and devout belief in his story.

 The problem with all of the belief in Smollett is that, like Ms. Page’s impassioned Late Show rant, it was entirely based on emotion and not reason.

As is usually the case when decisions are made on emotion and not reason, many now regret their embrace of Smollett because his story has come into question. The two alleged assailants are not MAGA hat wearing White men, but Black men who claim that Smollett paid them to stage the whole incident. According to reports, as of this writing the Chicago police believe this entire hate crime is a hoax orchestrated by Smollett.

VIDEO LINK

The media, celebrities and politicians who supported Smollett did so for the simple reason…it was easy. Smollett’s story confirmed all of their biases regarding Trump supporters who they believe are racist homophobes, and gave them the opportunity to signal their virtue and espouse their moral superiority.

This sort of indulging in one’s biases and signaling one’s virtue is epidemic in America and a big reason for that is social media.  Social media is built to be a personalized echo chamber that triggers emotion and shortcuts reason, and encourages a solidifying of instantaneous emotional reaction into permanent and intractable belief.

Another reason for this scourge of confirmation bias and virtue signaling is that the corporate press is not in the truth-telling business, they are in the tell people what they want to hear business. Just watch this MSNBC breaking news segment on the alleged attack on Smollett.

None of the professionals in this clip ever practice anything resembling journalism by actually questioning the voracity of the allegation. The anchorwoman Stephanie Ruhle is signaling her virtue so hard over this story, repeatedly declaring it’s a “horrible story” and “horrible to report” and then admitting she is “so shaken by the story”, that she can’t remember details of it.

This vapid emotional hyperventilation is a case study in cultural conditioning overpowering professional training. Ms. Ruhle, and the rest of the media who were so gullible regarding Smollett’s story, has been indoctrinated to quell skepticism regarding a “victim’s” story because doubt is now deemed the equivalent of assault. GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis made this clear when she commented on the Smollett story, “Jussie Smollett was victimized first in a hate-motivated and violent attack…and has since been doubly victimized as the subject of speculation by the media…” If reporters question Jussie Smollett’s story that doesn’t make them bigots, it makes them journalists.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin

The confirmation bias and virtue signaling in American culture is not confined to the Smollett case. The establishment media’s handling of all Russia stories is equally rife with a pandering to biases and a self-righteous signaling of patriotic virtue.

For example, last fall both NBC News and the New York Times hyped a bizarre James Bond-level spy story claiming the Russians had developed a nefarious super secret sonic weapon and used it to attack U.S. personnel in Cuba. This story was riddled with logical inconsistencies but the press reported it as if Putin were pointing his sonic weapon at every American’s head. Of course, upon closer inspection, these “sonic attacks” weren’t attacks at all but horny crickets trying to attract a mate. 

The media’s reporting of similar stories detailing alleged Russian villainy is hysterical, literally. Whether it is Russia hacking the Vermont power grid or into C-Span, it seems there is no skepticism allowed when it comes to Russia. And similar to the Smollett case, if you dare question the voracity of these Russia stories your virtue/patriotism is questioned.

This suffocating of skepticism has led all Russia related stories to become sacrosanct and be considered gospel truth. Yet, just like in the Smollett story, if you look at the majority of Russia related reporting you will notice it is often based on reporters treating assumptions as facts.

“The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.” - Joseph Goebbels

The Smollett fiasco is small potatoes compared to the greatest example of media malpractice in recent memory, which was the Iraq war farce. The establishment media weren’t only entirely uncritical in regards to the Bush administration’s outlandish claims regarding WMD’s and an Iraqi connection with Al Qaeda, but were complicit in emotionally triggering the American people to sell them that insidious snake oil.

Back in 2003 during the build up to the war, dissent was verboten. The media were entirely in lockstep with the Bush administration and acted as stenographers to power as opposed to a check on it, with MSNBC even firing its highest rated host, Phil Donohue, because of his anti-war stance.

Just like the Smollett story and the reporting on Russia, in the Iraq war scam the media discarded skepticism in favor of confirmation bias and virtue/patriotism signaling. The disinformation the media disseminated during this period didn’t just lead to egg on their face, but blood on their hands, as thousands of U.S. service members and over a million Iraqis were killed or wounded.

“Cursed is the one who trusts in man” – Book of Jeremiah 17:5

It would be nice to think that those who fell under the spell of confirmation bias in the Smollett case would have learned their lesson, but if the response of filmmaker Ava DuVernay and author Roxanne Gay is any indication, nothing will change. As Ms. DuVernay told the Hollywood Reporter, “…this won’t stop me from believing others. It can’t.”

Ms. Gay echoed the sentiment, “I’m not going to stop believing people who say they have suffered”.

The media is also proving their inability to learn from their mistakes by once again singing in harmony with the Washington establishment chorus who hunger for a coup in Venezuela. The continuing media sycophancy towards American imperialism and militarism across the globe shows a shameful myopia and a stunning historical illiteracy.

As the Smollett story teaches us, confirmation bias is a very addictive drug, and as the corporate media’s Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Russia and Venezuela coverage shows, it is a dangerous and deadly one too…and the only remedy for this epidemic of idiocy is an ardent and unrelenting commitment to skepticism.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.com.

©2019

Vice: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Although a cinematic misfire of sorts, it is worth seeing for the extraordinary performances and for the civics lesson.

Vice, written and directed by Adam McKay, is the story of the meteoric rise of former Vice President Dick and his Machiavellian use of power. The film stars Christian Bale as Cheney, with supporting turns from Amy Adams, Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell.

Vice is another one of those films of 2018 for which I had high hopes. I absolutely loved director Adam McKay’s last film, The Big Short, which brilliantly dissected the 2008 financial meltdown and I hoped that when he set his sights on Dick Cheney he would be equally effective in his vivisection of that worthy target. McKay proved with The Big Short that he was more than capable of turning a dense, intricate, complex and complicated topic into an entertaining and enlightening movie, a skill that would be desperately needed for a film about Dick Cheney.

Watching Vice was an odd experience as I found the film had multiple great parts to it, but on the whole, while I liked it, I didn’t love it and ultimately found it unsatisfying. I was so confounded by my experience of Vice that I have actually seen it three times already to try and figure out specifically why I feel that it missed the mark and is not the sum total of its parts. And yes…I realize that seeing a movie I don’t love three times makes me sound insane.

Why am I so interested in figuring out why Vice is not great, you may ask? Well, the reason for that is that Vice desperately needed to be great because it is such an important film for the times in which we live. Trump did not come out of nowhere…he is a fungus that grew out of the shit pile that was Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush/Cheney and Obama…and as we all know, past is prologue, so if we don’t fully understand and integrate the lessons of Dick Cheney’s nefarious political career, we are doomed to stay stuck in the tyrannical rut in which we find ourselves.

Dick Cheney was a pivotal, behind the scenes player in American politics for four decades (70’s through the 00’s) and so bringing his sprawling yet mundanely bureaucratic career successfully to the screen is a massive and difficult undertaking. It is also an vital undertaking as the argument could be made, and Vice makes it, that Cheney’s underlying cosmology and his political and bureaucratic success are what has brought the U.S. and much of the world to the brink of collapse.

Sadly though, Vice is so structurally unsound as to be nearly untenable. McKay cinematically stumbles right out of the gate and makes some poor directorial decisions that lead to a lack of narrative coherence and dramatic cohesion that diminish the impact of this important movie.

I could not help but think of Oliver Stone as I watched Vice. Stone’s Nixon is an obvious cinematic parallel to Vice in that it is a bio-pic of a loathed political figure whose career spans multiple decades. The problem with Vice though is that McKay not only lacks Stone’s directorial skill and talent, he also lacks his testicular fortitude and artistic courage.

In Nixon, which is a terrific film you should revisit, Stone and his cinematographer, the great Robert Richardson, go to great lengths to show us Nixon’s point of view and perspective, and it works in drawing viewers into the man who otherwise may have repulsed them. Stone and Richardson occasionally used the technique of switching film stocks and going from color to black and white in order to distinguish Nixon’s point of view and to emphasize flash backs and time jumps. (Vice certainly could’ve used this sort of approach to make the time jumps it uses more palatable and cinematically appealing)

Of course, Stone was pilloried for his dramatic speculation in Nixon by the gatekeepers of Establishment thinking, but despite the critical slings and arrows, it was the proper creative decision. Stone turned Nixon into a Shakespearean character and we knew him and understood him much better because of it, which turned the film about his life into fascinating and gripping viewing.

Cheney, like his one-time boss Richard Nixon, is also cold and distant figure in real life, but McKay never emulates Oliver Stone and bridges that distance by using dramatic speculation in telling his story. McKay makes the fatal directorial error of only on the most rare of occasions allowing viewers into Dick Cheney’s head and giving them his distinct perspective and point of view. For the majority of the film the audience is forced to be simply spectators to Cheney’s villainy and not participants or co-conspirators, which undermines the dramatic power of the film.

The most interesting parts of the film are the two parts where we are actually given Cheney’s perspective and inner dialogue. The first time that happens is when we hear a voice over of Cheney’s thoughts as he meets with presidential candidate George W. Bush to talk about the Vice Presidency. In this scene we are given access to Cheney’s Macchiavellian musings about the man, Dubya, that he will use as an avatar to bring his dark vision to life, and it is intriguing.

McKay’s brief speculation of Cheney’s inner thoughts in the Bush scene propels the audience into Cheney’s head…which is where we should have been all along. We are then ushered out as soon as we arrive and are left with only a bird’s eye view of Cheney’s world until the final scene. Vice would have benefited greatly from McKay throwing the audience into Cheney’s head from the get go, but instead we get a rehash of Cheney’s greatest hits, or worst hits, depending on your political point of view, which is neither illuminating nor gripping. ( to be fair, McKay’s refusal to speculate on Cheney’s inner thoughts and motivations could be a function of the fact that Cheney is still alive and able to sue, but regardless of the reason, it does a terrible disservice to the cinematic enterprise)

McKay was obviously going to great lengths trying to be “historically accurate” in this bio-pic, but he falls into the trap of many, if not most bio-pics, in that he tries to recreate history instead of creating cinematic drama. McKay simply shows a series of well-known events in Cheney’s life (hey…remember that time Cheney shot somebody in the face!) without any new or interesting insights into them. In this way, Vice is less a drama/comedy than it is a docu-dramedy that merely skims the surface of its subject and re-tells history for those who already agree with its political perspective.

The biggest hurdle though in telling the story of Dick Cheney is…well…Dick Cheney. When your film’s lead character suffers from an egregious charisma deficit and has created a persona of impenetrable banality, you have quite a hill to climb. Besides mastering the art of dullness, Cheney is also an unlikable and politically despicable person, which only adds to the burden that this film must carry. Unlike in The Big Short, where McKay was able to use multiple characters to propel the narrative, each one different and interesting in their own right, in Vice, McKay is forced to have Cheney be the sole focus and driver of the narrative.

As vacant a character as Dick Cheney is, Christian Bale makes him a genuine human being. Bale disappears into Cheney and crushes the role to such an extent that he solidifies his place amongst the best actors working today. Bale’s confident use of stillness and silence is volcanically potent. There is no wasted motion with Bale’s Cheney, and it is when he isn’t saying anything that he is saying everything. Bale fills Cheney with very specific and detailed intentions that radiate off of him and penetrate his intended target with deadly precision.

The rest of the cast do outstanding work as well. Amy Adams is simply one of the best actresses on the planet and her work in Vice is a testament to that fact. Adams’ first scene as Dick’s wife Lynne is so dynamically compelling I nearly jumped out of my seat. Right out of the gate Adams tells the viewer everything we need to know about Lynne, she is smart, tough and will not put up with any bullshit. Adams’ Lynne is insatiable when it comes to power, and she is the Lady MacBeth behind Dick’s throne. Amy Adams has given a plethora of great performances over her career, but she has never been better than she is as Lynne Cheney in Vice.

Sam Rockwell is also outstanding, playing the cocksure but dim-witted poseur of a president George W. Bush. Rockwell plays Bush as an unwitting moron and dupe who is so stupid he doesn’t know how stupid he really is. Cheney’s manipulation of Bush is seamless and entirely believable with Rockwell playing the insecure second generation President. Rockwell never falls into caricature with his Dubya, and fills this empty man with a delightful and at times poignantly meaningful nothingness.

Steve Carell is also great as the enigmatic Don Rumsfeld. Carell morphs into the irascible political climber Rumsfeld with ease and shows a deft touch in making Rummy a genuine human being, a sort of arrogant fly boy whose wings never get permanently clipped.

All in all, the entire cast do great work with Bale, Adams and Rockwell all deserving Oscar nominations for their work, and Bale and Adams very much deserving of the trophy.

As much as Adam McKay won the casting room, he did have other failures when it came to filmmaking. I am sure it is no coincidence that McKay hired editor Hank Corwin to work on his film, as Corwin edited Stone’s Nixon as well. Surprisingly since he was so good on Nixon, Corwin’s editing on Vice lacks a cinematic crispness and is one of the weak spots of the film. Corwin repeatedly uses a black screen for transitions which I found broke the pace and rhythm of the film and scuttled any dramatic momentum. Of course, this is not all Corwin’s fault, as McKay may have demanded that approach, but regardless of why it happened, it happened and the film suffers for it.

Another issue with the film was the use of a narrator. Well, to be more clear, it wasn’t the use of a narrator, but the choice of the narrator and how that character fit into the story. Jesse Plemons, a fantastic actor, plays the role of the narrator but it never quite comes together. Plemons is fine in the part, but considering the amount of information that needed to be passed along to the audience, a more direct and straight forward narrator would’ve been a better choice. Once again, Oliver Stone comes to mind and his mesmerizing opening to his masterpiece JFK, where Martin Sheen (and phenomenal editors Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing) masterfully set the complex stage for everything that follows.

As much as I was frustrated by McKay’s direction, there were some moments of brilliance. McKay’s use of Alfred Molina as a waiter explaining the crimes of the Bush administration was absolutely magnificent. His expanded exploration of the idea of the “Unitary Executive” was smart and well done too.

Other sequences by McKay that were simply sublime were when McKay would show the global and life altering power of the Presidency. In one sequence we see Nixon and Kissinger having a discussion about their Vietnam and Cambodia policy…and then we see the catastrophic results of that policy on regular people. The same thing occurs in relation to Bush and Iraq in one of the finer cinematic moments of the movie, where all of the power politics in America reduce people half way around the world to cower under a table in fear for their lives.

There was one other scene that is worth mentioning, and not because it is so great, but because it reveals something nefarious about the film itself. In one scene where the principals of the Bush administration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice etc., are debating whether to invade Iraq or not, there is a bit of dialogue which states in essence that Israel is opposed to the U.S. invasion because it will destablize the region. This is historically completely inaccurate and entirely at odds with reality. Why would Adam McKay put this bit of Israeli misinformation into his film that purports to tell the truth about the Bush administration? I think I know the reason why…but that is an uncomfortable discussion for another day.

In conclusion, as much as I wanted to love Vice because it shares my vision of the world and of the Bush administration, I didn’t love it. Cheney, like Nixon before him, should have been prosecuted and imprisoned for his crimes, instead of having his lackeys turned into exalted talking heads on MSNBC and CNN. If Vice were better made, if it were more coherent, cohesive and effective in its storytelling, it could have done to the Bush/Cheney administration, what The Big Short did to Wall Street…exposed them bare for the repugnant, amoral and immoral criminal pigs that they are.

Sadly, Vice doesn’t rise to the challenge, and so the historical myopia that pervades our current culture will persist and prosper. Liberals will continue to think everything was great before Trump and that Trump is responsible for all that is wrong in the world…and thus they doom themselves to repeat the cycle that brought us Trump in the first place. Just like Nixon gave us Reagan and Reagan gave us Clinton and Clinton gave us Bush/Cheney and Bush/Cheney gave us Obama and Obama gave us Trump…Trump will birth us another monster and it will devour us all unless we wake up and understand that it isn’t the individual that is rotten, it is the system that is rotting.

With all of that said, if you get a chance I do recommend you go see Vice, it is worth seeing for the exquisite performances of Bale, Adams and Rockwell alone. It is also worthwhile to see Vice to understand that as much as we’d like to blame others, be it Russians, Republicans or Democrats for all of our troubles, the truth is that Cheney bureaucratically maneuvered to give us the fascist tyranny for which we were clamoring. The fight is simply over who gets to control it the beast that is devouring us, and to see how much we can make selling rope to those who wish to hang us. My one solace to this national existential crisis is revenge, and the hope that I will get to see Dick Cheney and the rest of his gang at the end of one of those ropes before I die.

©2019

The Emmys Get "Spicey"!!

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 37 seconds

Sean Spicer made a surprise appearance at the Emmys on Sunday night and it drove Hollywood and the establishment absolutely crazy.

On Sunday night, Stephen Colbert, host of CBS' Late Night with Stephen Colbert, hosted television’s Emmy awards, and brought along his trademark biting political comedy. For the most part, things went as expected on the show as diversity was cheered, Trump was jeered and self-congratulation dominated the evening.

The biggest star of the night though, in absentia, was President Trump. Colbert set his sights on Trump and skewered him mercilessly throughout his monologue. Trump’s presence loomed large over the proceedings, even among the award winners, as Saturday Night Live won an award due to its comedic coverage of the 2016 election with Alec Baldwin and Melissa McCarthy garnering awards for their iconic comedic portrayals on SNL of Donald Trump and Sean Spicer, respectively.

Speaking of which, the one big surprise of the evening that has gotten tongues wagging here in Hollywood, was not a wardrobe malfunction, a big upset winner or a La La Land - Moonlight Oscar level controversy, no, the big news of the Emmy awards was the appearance of …Mr. Sean "Spicey" Spicer.

Spicer, the much-mocked former spokesperson for the Trump White House, came on stage and had a little fun at his own expense when he said, "This will be the largest audience to witness the Emmys, period – both in person, and around the world”.  

Spicer was playing off of his famously incorrigible, bordering on incontinent, defense of Trump’s inauguration crowd size, which occurred in the first week of his job as White House Spokesmen, and set an adversarial tone between he and the press, not to mention observable reality. Spicer's display of good humor at his own expense at the Emmys was moderately well received in the room and according to reports he was quite popular at the after parties.

Not everyone in Hollywood, or elsewhere, was so enamored with the Emmys “normalization” of Spicer. Zach Braff, former star of the television show Scrubs, summed up the opinion of many when he tweeted, "I’m not ready to laugh “with” Sean Spicer. I think he is an evil, opportunistic liar, that hurt our country". Many others on twitter followed suit. 

Jon Favreau, former speechwriter for Barack Obama, tweeted, "Harvard fellowships, Emmy appearances, huge speaking fees: there’s just gonna be no penalty for working in Trump’s white house ".

I dislike Spicer and am repulsed by Trump, but I found Favreau’s anger to be grating, considering the man he worked for, President Obama, committed a plethora of immoral acts while in office and no one ever dare speak of them, never mind hold any of his underlings like Favreau accountable for them.

For instance, after Obama ordered a drone strike that successfully assassinated Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, a 16 year-old American boy living in Yemen, Obama’s spokesmen and Favreau’s colleague, Robert Gibbs, said that the child “should have a far more responsible father” if he didn’t want to be murdered in cold blood. What Gibbs said about the Al-Awlaki boy is decidedly much worse than anything Spicer ever said about crowd sizes or anything else, and Gibbs has faced no social penalty for that or for his boss’s unethical and potentially criminal acts while in office, and neither has indignant tweeter Jon Favreau.

And even though the mainstream media and many liberals like to brush aside these uncomfortable facts, let us not forget that besides murdering an American child overseas, and many foreign-born ones too, Obama also savaged the first amendment and freedom of the press here at home by attacking whistleblowers under the archaic espionage act, something he did more times, 8, than all of our other presidents combined. He also sold out the country, the working class in particular, when he ignored the rule of law by failing to prosecute the crooks and liars on Wall Street who, through egregious fraud, drove the economy off a cliff in 2008. Despite all of these atrocious acts, Obama and his underlings have no fear of being shunned by  “serious” people in elite circles.

And do not forget that Obama also made the cowardly decision to “look forward” and not prosecute Bush administration officials for their war crimes. Which brings us to Jeb Bush’s former spokesman Tim Miller, who proved it wasn’t just the mainstream left that were angered by Spicer’s Emmy appearance, but the establishment right as well, when he tweeted, “I know people who were offered opportunities to lie for Donald Trump and quietly declined. Harvard and The Emmys calling wrong folks”.

Anyone even remotely connected to the Bush family calling out Sean Spicer, or anyone else, for shamelessly lying is the height of hypocrisy. President Bush, unquestioningly supported by his low energy brother Jeb, lied America into a war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in Mesopotamia.

Besides the war crime of preemptive invasion in Iraq, President Bush also undermined America’s legal and moral authority by presiding over a brutal torture and rendition program that violated international law and the Geneva Conventions. 

This is the same president Bush who also instituted an intrusive and unconstitutional domestic surveillance program in order to spy on the American people, and then had his surrogates lie about it to the American people.

Bush administration spokesmen, Ari Fleischer, along with Bush speechwriter David Frum, communications director Nicole Wallace and neo-con war cheerleaders Bill Kristol and Max Boot, among others, propagated the lies about WMD that convinced America to go to war in Iraq, and also dissembled the truth about domestic spying and torture and yet they now face no social stigma for their sins, but rather are celebrated by the establishment press.

In fact, if you turn on any cable news program you will be sure to see plenty of former Bush administration talking heads not just being “normalized”, but held in the highest regard for their knowledge and insight, instead of being berated for their moral depravity and ethical degeneracy. Fleischer is a regular contributor on CNN, and Frum, Kristol and Boot are all held in the highest esteem at the allegedly liberal MSNBC because they routinely assail Trump. Nicole Wallace is so adored by MSNBC, she got her own show on the network.

These miscreants should be shunned, badgered or chastised at every turn for being accomplices to the Bush regime’s crimes, but instead they benefit from the disease that is epidemic in America, political myopia and historical amnesia.

In the age of Trump, it is establishment liberals who suffer the most severe cases of this malady of myopia and amnesia, and there are no greater examples of this than the odious political comedian Bill Maher, and MSNBC host Joy Reid.

Maher, an avowed liberal, has been waxing nostalgic for a return to the glory of the Bush years ever since Trump came to office. Apparently Maher abhors Trump’s assault on presidential “norms” so much that he prefers the good old days when the presidency wasn’t sullied by Trump’s uncouth behavior, but only by Bush’s preemptive war, torture and surveillance and Obama’s kill list, war on whistleblowers and his ignoring of Wall Street and Executive branch criminality.

Joy Reid, a devout Clinton supporting liberal, recently was quoted as saying that she has more in common with neo-cons like Frum, Boot and Kristol than she does with those on the far left. When you embrace the muscular American empire of Bush neo-conservatism and the globalist economics of Clinton neo-liberalism like Reid has, you’ve really mastered the art of bad ideas. But at least Reid is not alone with her vacuous ideology, as nearly everyone else in the mainstream media, Bill Maher included, parrot the same nonsense that she does. 

What I dislike even more than Spicer and Trump, is the holier-than-thou hypocrisy of those on both the left and the right in the political and media establishment who willfully ignore the moral and ethical depravity that infected the White House long before Trump ever did.

If the institutions of “decent society” can be so craven as to exalt the deplorable scoundrels who were accomplices to the crimes of Bush and Obama, then maybe those White House veterans, like Favreau, Wallace and Frum, who benefit from that amoral worship of power should, at a minimum, keep their mouths shut and be grateful they aren’t in prison or at the end of a rope.

But former and present Trump administration staff like Spicer, Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon shouldn’t fret about their post-White House careers. If they really want to guarantee themselves a high-paying, cushy job in cable news, all they need to do is convince Trump to tweet less and kill more. You see, in the eyes of the “serious people” in “polite society”, tweeting is horrifically un-presidential, but killing, torturing and spying in the name of American Empire? That’s how you get the keys to the establishment kingdom.

This article was previously published on Wednesday, September 20, at RT.

©2017