The Hypocrisy of Obama's MSNBC Water Carriers

Seldom discussed as a propaganda organ that is in its own right every bit the equal of Fox News MSNBC plumbs the depths of political discourse in providing a constant forum of dishonesty and hypocrisy.  The network, which is owned by GE, one of the largest defense contractors of the U.S. military industrial complex regularly shills for more war albeit wrapped up in the bright shining lie of a package of humanitarian interventions. The resulting dead from the collateral damage of wars of aggression or missions of ‘mercy’ are no different and the profits reaped by GE remain constant. The network is so shameless of a water-carrier for the Barack Obama administration that it is astounding that it receives any legitimacy at all. Fox is after all very transparent as the media arm of the Republican party establishment which in a perverse and twisted sort of way is somewhat honorable. I suppose that some credit can go to former Richard M. Nixon media guru Roger Ailes who is as unabashedly incapable of shame as fellow former Nixon administration figures such as Pat Buchanan who wears his bigotry on his sleeve and G. Gordon Liddy who in his book “Will” admitted his admiration for Hitler.

Buchanan is among the last of a dying breed and a dinosaur who used to drink Wild Turkey with Hunter S. Thompson is not going to be sucked into the tar pit without a struggle but he has now become a cartoon. His contemporary G. Gordon Liddy, also getting ready to pass into history was always a no bullshit guy when it came to his true sentiments as well. I especially liked the following expression of his burgeoning man love for a newly discovered idol from "Will" where he speaks wistfully of how the Liddy family maid, Teresa inculcated in the young whelp an adoration of Der Führer:

One day Teresa was excited. He was going to be on the radio. Just wait till I hear him speak! Eagerly, I joined her at the Emerson [radio]. First the music, the now familiar strains of a song that started, “Die Fahne hoch…” – Raise the banner…” It was a rousing, powerful anthem the Horst Wessel song.

 We could tell he was about to speak. The crowd could hardly contain itself. They hailed him in the huge swelling ovations that carried me along. Sieg!”someone would shout, and what seemed like all the people in the world would answer with a roar, “Heil!”. For he was their leader, Der Führer, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s voice started out calmly, in low, dispassionate tones, but as he spoke of what his people would accomplish, his voice rose in pitch and tempo. Once united, the German people could do anything, surmount any obstacle, rout any enemy, achieve fulfillment. He would lead them; there would be one people, one nation, one leader. Here was the very antithesis of fear – sheer animal confidence and the power of will. He sent an electric current through my body and, as the massive audience thundered its absolute support and determination, the hair on the back of my neck rose and I realized suddenly that I had stopped breathing.

Liddy’s love affair with full-blown Nazism would go on and he allegedly once arranged for a showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda film Triumph of the Will to fellow fascist worshipers in the White House. At least the old school guys from Nixon’s administration had a strange sort of integrity in that they are unabashed about their bigotry unlike the young turks currently operating in the political realm with their weasel words and focus group distilled blather. Only in the 2014 Homeland could one find any virtue in this but such is the world in which we now live, a dystopian nightmare where ignorance is exalted and with each passing day we see that Orwell was an optimist.

But as the Dylan song goes, “you know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace” and there is much brimstone scented smoke that emanates from the MSNBC sets. Some of the worst swill that is upchucked from the Democratic party electronic propaganda sewer spews forth five nights a week on the Rachel Maddow Show.  Maddow, who is a lesbian regularly uses her broadcast to hide her task as a Democratic party saleswoman under layers of identity group saturated diatribes that primarily serve as polemics against some of the more blatantly asinine statements by Republican party politicians, primarily those of the so-called tea party. Maddow, who parlayed her fame as a member of the Air America liberal radio network into her present career, much like Minnesota Senator Al Franken a fellow traveler is now an essential protector of the establishment while other former hosts who did not conform (Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy) have been exiled to the fringes. I will admittedly on occasion tune in to Maddow although I often regret it fairly quickly given the lack of substantive coverage of real issues, a failure to hold the Obama administration accountable and the selling of the war machine, a good deal of it by resident Pentagon flack Richard Engel who tried his damned best to push for war in Syria.

Last night prior to the BCS Championship game really getting revved up I happened to catch Maddow’s interview with  Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall St.).  The bagman for financial criminals, following the lunatic Peter King (R-IRA) chose to pile onto Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a favorite punching bag for the two-party syndicate that protects the corrupt system. Schumer, reciting straight from the Obama-DNC talking points went for Pauls throat over the expiration of extended benefits for the long-term unemployed painting him as the leader of the “hard right Republicans” who are “stopping everything”, using a comment attributed to the son of Ron that “unemployment insurance is a disservice to the American worker”, more than likely taken out of context and packaged as a chunk of bloody red meat.

While it wasn’t exactly King accusing him of letting New Yorkers be murdered by Muslim terrorists it was every bit as disingenuous. When Schumer gets up on his soapbox on the Maddow Show and proclaims that “The turning away from the middle class is dominated by one party” and brays in ginned up outrage about Rand Paul’s comments fly in the very face of (gag) the “American ethos” being attacked:

“What he’s saying is, that people would rather not work and collect these meager unemployment benefits. That is not true. There is a work ethos in America, it’s part of our American being and it doesn’t just apply to CEOs or nuclear physicists. The guy who cleans the floor late at night has a pride in making sure that floor is really clean. The woman who will organize an office has a real pride in making sure it is extremely well organized and everything is in it’s place. So this idea that the hard right has that people will stop looking for work and is just bunk and insulting to the American worker and to the American ethos”

What a condescending phony prick. Just think of how MSNBC would portray that sort of a rotten elitist comment were it to have come from Mitt Romney. It brings to mind Judge Smails from Caddyshack who proclaimed that “The world needs ditch-diggers too”.

Maddow of course would never dare to question the Wall Street's own senator and senator from the party and the administration that has continually screwed the American worker, ethos be damned while pumping 85 billion dollars of month into the banking casinos. Nor as to why any American worker who has a shit job such as cleaning the floors late at night (probably for minimum wage) or the woman who organizes offices would have any reason to be “proud” of such lousy employment opportunities while Schumer and his ilk continue to loot the coffers to subsidize the banksters who destroyed the economy once and are rapidly inflating the mother of all bubbles that will ultimately bring about the final collapse. That an unprincipled charlatan such as Schumer can go out and make this argument is as obscene as it is insulting to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention to the joint bipartisan effort to dismantle the middle class through the Ponzi schemes of high finance, crony capitalism, cheating and offshoring American jobs by the millions to low-cost third world shitholes where people will work in abhorrent sweatshop conditions for pennies an hour. As the late H.L. Mencken would have put it “imagine a gentleman and you will imagined everything that he was not”.

Senator Schumer by the way is also one of the key drivers of the efforts to undermine the P5+1 talks to restrict the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. It has been pretty much acknowledged that the sabotage of the current diplomatic negotiations by swine like Schumer who don’t give a rat’s ass about American interests will lead to war. But that war will make GE and Shumer’s buddies on Wall Street very happy with the tide of blood money that will come rolling in.