The jaw-dropping lack of accountability prevalent among our elites, no matter how enormous and damaging their quite public failures, has led seemingly reasonable people who ought to know better to, virtually en masse,  unintentionally embrace the ludicrous farce that in my family we call the Gravy Boat Theory. Only with them, it’s a lot less funny.  Just about every day you hear that a billion or so dollars just up and walked away, a newfangled financial “instrument” turned out to be Three Card Monte, or a war was fraudulently peddled and lost, generally from someone with bulging pockets and/or a disturbingly large Tiffany’s account.  It’s a story as old as time, but always seems fresh, whether you’re hearing it from Ken Lay, Condi Rice, or,  just lately, Jon Corzine.

What does this have to do with gravy boats?  For me, anyway, more than you’d think.  You see, my mother, Joan, became increasingly obsessed with Christmas as she got older, and tended to begin shopping by at least March.  This led to some mixups, naturally, when she got around to wrapping presents, which was usually as soon as she’d put away the Halloween decorations.  One November, my brother Turd received the following panicked call:  (dialogue recreated from repeated, and possibly embellished,  repetition)

TURD: Hello?

JOAN: (with utmost urgency) I think someone broke into my house and stole one of your Christmas presents.

TURD: (skeptically) Really?  Anyway, Mom, it’s only November 1st.

JOAN:  (apologetically) I know.  But I got you a gravy boat to match your china last summer and now I can’t find it anywhere.  I think it’s gone.

TURD:  I think you should keep looking.  Then, if you find it, it’ll still be a surprise for me at Christmas.

Of course, Joan found the gravy boat a couple of days later, but because our family is the opposite of, say, David Gregory, we never let her forget it.  Any time someone wanted to escape blame for an obvious personal mistake or transgression, particularly when Joan was around,  we’d say (in Joan voice) “someone broke in.”  In this way, everything from a vanished bottle of booze, a booger or chewing gum stuck someplace, or a stinky bathroom could be blamed on a wily and elusive intruder.  We went so far with it that my hippie friend John even came up with an imagined dialogue between Joan and the police:

OFFICER: (with deep concern) We came as soon as we could.

JOAN: Oh, thank you.

OFFICER:  Was anything else missing?  Maybe a soup tureen or a turkey platter?

JOAN:  I hadn’t thought of that….

OFFICER: (gravely) Well, you should.  These people are ruthless.

Needless to say, when I hear the lame excuses from the many banksters, neocons, and other various grifters and charlatans bandied about in the news these days, I think they’d be better off just saying “Someone broke in and stole the (WMD’s, billions, surplus, or whatever)” and calling it a day.  In the end, it’s a little more plausible, and certainly more endearing, than, say, “no one could have predicted _______.”  The key difference, of course, is that Joan was doing something sweet and generous and made an honest mistake for which she was nonetheless relentlessly teased; the more prominent promoters of the Gravy Boat Theory these days were doing something selfish and heinous and got caught, but are getting away with it.

I’d like to invite then all over for Christmas; gravy will be served.  In style.

It seems that war profiteer and Pentagon shill Barry McCaffrey slithered into Little Beirut the other day, to talk about some things near and dear to his heart, like, well, war profits, and their indefinite continuation.  The Oregonian’s jaw-droppingly credulous and fawning interview  with this flagrant criminal contained some of the most blatantly authoritarian and imperially dismissive things I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying something.  All were transmitted without comment or correction, natch, by veteran Oregonian reporter Mike Francis.

Entitled, somewhat misleadingly, “Barry McCaffrey Speaks in Portland on PTSD, Mexican Drug Cartels, and Homeland Security” (a more appropriate headline would have been, “McCaffrey Seeks to Continue Cashing In On Climate of Fear He Helped Create”), the article contains so little news I would have learned more reading a three-year-old Pottery Barn catalog.  It’s considered “news” that what McCaffrey had to say about the first, most tedious subject, PTSD, when asked whether PTSD was “hard to diagnose” by the reporter, who would obviously believe anything, McCaffrey said the following:
A: It is. When you’re looking at somebody with physical injuries that are immense and sometimes TBI, which you can’t see, … That’s a population where PTSD is just another diagnosis. I mean it’s there. It’s automatic.

Kids coming out of combat, with multiple combat tours, have been under stress, they do act a little crazy. It takes them a little time to acclimatize.

But for some number, whether it’s for underlying mental health, pre-existing drug and alcohol abuse or other factors, some of them exhibit longer-term disorder. And therein lies the problem.

So PTSD a little bit tricky and in the middle of all it are some of the most awful phonies I have ever encountered in my life. It is beyond belief. I personally have run into professional PTSD patients. Just shameful beyond belief.

Spoken like the purest of chickenhawks; indifferent if not hostile to the needs of those their relentless warmongering has mauled, killed or driven insane, McCaffrey is ashamed, not of himself, but his victims.  Rather than being horrified to hear such an astonishingly callous remark from from such a transparent slimeball, Francis timidly continues:
Q: It certainly obscures the real issue for the rest of us.

A: Absolutely. I want the VA to focus on the devastated veteran population I want to go through acute care and then chronic care. And where we’ve got long-term injuries, have an appropriate therapy program. But basically, people get better.

The best soldier I ever saw, he was a platoon sergeant at age 21, has never recovered from the war because he’s never found anything else at that level of excitement and value and importance.

American soldiers exposed to intense combat, generally speaking aren’t damaged by it. They’re made more powerful.

Now, upon hearing such arrogant, sociopathic claptrap, this is where you’d normally expect the reporter to fall off his chair, but this guy clearly wants to be David Gregory when he grows up. By now greedily eating out of McCaffrey’s bloodstained paw, he says this, and I’m not making this up:
Q: Oregon isn’t an active duty state, although we’ve had guys go multiple times. But our state National Guard has a higher-than-average toll of suicide. About half of those were people who never deployed. So I’m mystified by that. And I also wonder how meaningful it is to say they’re military suicides when they’re basically drilling once a month.

A: One of my friends is Dr. Sally Satel. One of her big deals as a psychiatrist is don’t ever set somebody up to think they’re permanently impaired. You don’t ever tell them that, for God’s sakes.

The Army to some extent has gone utterly sensitive on suicide. We’ve linked it in some ways, perhaps unintentionally, to soldiers being the victims of a war.

(A doctor at Walter Reed told me) “It doesn’t really matter to us if you’re a National Guard soldier and you’ve never deployed, you came in with a drug and alcohol problem, you came in with underlying health disorders, but we’ve got you now and you’re exhibiting symptoms of distress, we’ve got to listen to you and try to make you better.” What we don’t want to do is say it’s related in some way to this war, because, in many cases, it isn’t.

The primary cause of suicide in young soldiers is alcohol abuse, away from home, frequently tied to rejection by significant other and access to guns. And that drives our rate up.

THE ARMY HAS GONE UTTERLY SENSITIVE ON SUICIDE.  Yep, he said that, and the hapless lackey of a reporter was evidently so befuddled that he decided he’d better switch, but quick, to drugs and Mexicans before the men in white coats showed up to haul away his interviewee.  So he did, and after typing obediently that this paragon of virtue thinks we also need to militarize the border and throw lots more people in jail, Francis did manage to peep out a tiny question about stopping the drug war, a shocking affront to which the ever-loquacious McCaffrey babbled thusly:
A: The legalization argument amuses me. Usually it’s an intellectual argument that on cursory examination falls apart. Nobody in their right minds wants to legalize drugs. It absolutely doesn’t work……

Part of it is we know that if you make substances less available, and then more expensive, and if you stigmatize them by saying it’s criminal to sell them, drug use goes down. That’s the deal.

Not in the real world, of course, but I digress.  The fact that tawdry exemplars of corruption and amorality like Barry McCaffrey are running around loose saying such errant, self-serving nonsense and are treated as credible by ass-kissing reporters like this one is the cause of all of our problems.  Must be that Francis is hoping for an interview with Dick Cheney when he comes to town; he does have a book out and all, and like McCaffrey, loves those war profits, too.  This interview was quite an audition. 

Today’s example from The Oregonian is typical.  Vice President Joe Biden, in a Labor Day speech, declared that Republicans want to end Medicare, which or course they do, and all voted to do so just a few months ago.  The Ryan plan Biden quite specifically referenced would, for nakedly political purposes, exempt those Fox watchers 55 and over, so the VP did helpfully (and honestly) add, “in ten years.” Still, this wasn’t enough of a qualifier for Politifact.  The fact that Medicare is, by definition, a single payer, low overhead system of the sort enjoyed in the rest of the civilized world, while Ryan’s plan is more of the same waste-ridden, corrupt and ineffective thing we’ve got that costs twice as much with worse results, is never mentioned.  Worse, PolitiFact mendaciously adds, either out of ignorance or malice, that payouts under Ryan’s plan would “increase over time.”  Which they technically would, but, crucially, at the rate of general inflation, not at the rather more exponential rate of health care inflation, rendering a successful, universal, and guaranteed program a useless, probably means-tested, drop in the bucket in just a few decades.  It’s a Frank Luntz lie, and a well-crafted one, that calling something “Medicare” when it’s transparently no such thing, is OK as long as you’re still calling mailing out that same check to seniors to cover ever-rising premiums from the bloated, cutthroat insurance industry “Medicare.”  Given that logic, a rusting, stripped 1973 El Camino sitting on blocks outside a trailer, and a shiny late model Toyota Camry are both “cars,” to PolitiFact at least, so anybody who begs to differ must therefore be lying.  Behold:

Our ruling: (Which will be quite different from that of a sentient human)

Biden says Ryan’s plan “eliminates Medicare” in 10 years. In stating it that way in front of campaign donors, he strays from the “as we know it” qualifier even the president has used.

The bottom line is that all seniors would continue to be offered coverage under the proposal, and the program’s budget would increase every year. The plan would reduce the growth in Medicare spending but not wipe out that spending. And current beneficiaries and those currently 55 and over would not be affected by the changes. It changes Medicare, dramatically, but does not eliminate it.

We rate Biden’s statement False.

Really?  Would that David Gregory or any other addlepated Villager would hold, say, Dick Cheney, to such an exacting standard of truth, and do so with such gusto.  Their whole argument is pure bullshit, and yet they’re sticking to it against all evidence and repeated statements by virtually all of the leading, teabagging Republicans, most of whom have relatively openly advocated abolishing the program entirely.  It’s as though the incessant moving of Overton’s Window that has been gradually accomplished by the far right through just this subterfuge  in recent years has completely passed these intrepid fact-finders by; had they a pulse they would know that Republicans have been gunning for Medicare since its inception and it’s clear that they’re finally moving in for the kill.  Anything that dares to call itself PolitiFact should be rightly embarrassed, and laughed out of town, when the Republicans inevitably do abolish Medicare, but they won’t be, you can bet.  After all, no one could have predicted….

As though it weren’t enough that the American people have been forced to endure, post 2010, the worst episode of delusional Republican overreach since, well, the last time Presidential candidate (!) Newt Gingrich was in the news, this motley bunch of walking disasters have decided that everything Bush did was pure genius, and they’re loudly proclaiming this errant nonsense to a public which may be forgetful, but doesn’t have the late-stage Alzheimer’s required to swallow such horseshit.  To their addled minds, Americans ought to be proud of Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and tax cuts for the rich, forever.  Worse, they should surely thrill at the deceptive and questionable legal means necessary to achieve such murky, elitist goals in every state, not just in faraway Washington.

Like the craziest right-wingers of old who mistrusted Nixon until Watergate, a group determined by Bob Altemeyer’s exhaustive examination of right-wing authoritarianism to be a reliable quarter or so of the population, today’s mainstream Republicans just glory in the idea of taking up unpopular causes against the will of clear majorities, just for the joy of getting their way.  The more people they piss off, the better.  Such a strategy does wonders with the Fox News BarcaLounger set, but it obviously must also entail a lot of expensive and politically tricky misinformation, disenfranchisement, bribery, and myriad other unconstitutional behavior, since so few support the policies they want.  So far, they’ve been equal to the challenge; since the first post-Citizens (!) United election last November, all the KOCH-purchased states have quickly moved not just to make voting harder for Democratic-leaning groups, but have also moved aggressively against Democrats’ erstwhile funders while lavishing their own with government booty.  (Not that kind of booty, openly anyway, but I’m sure it’s involved, too…)

Basically, they’re admitting that they wouldn’t stand an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning if they had to play the game honestly, so they’re choosing the Rove/Bush playbook instead, since it’s all they have, but luckily, a lot of people still remember how things turned out with Bush and Rove.  Few of the much-discussed but seldom seen “Independents” recall all of the outrages of the Bush years, hence their nutty and stupid votes in 2004, but they do know that something went horribly wrong during 2001-2009, and that Condi, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al were clearly a part of it, as well as a power-grabbing, domineering executive branch that routinely treated overwhelmingly negative public opinion with a dismissive, “so what?”

We now have half a dozen states run by people that looked at the abysmal record of George W. Bush and decided that he wasn’t bold enough in ruining the country economically, socially, and morally, because he was too accommodating of his many opponents.  Basically we have a bunch of Fascist nutcases flexing their muscles who make The Decider look like Ghandi, so the media’s gotten suddenly nostalgic for the “adults” who worked for him, and started trotting them out to defend (lamely) his most revolting policies.  While this blatant journalistic failure does conveniently if momentarily  take the spotlight off of the most despised newly elected Republicans and their hijinks, it can only remind voters of the utter catastrophe of the Bush years, and its disturbingly mendacious and authoritarian tactics.

Good luck with that.  Maybe this proves once and for all that media really is liberal, and thus is cleverly playing eleven dimensional chess, but I doubt it.  They’re just dumb.

The worthies, using the term loosely, are:

1) Mitt Romney 35.14% Really.  He does look presidential and all, but do you think that all the Bain Capital layoffs, his own “Obamacare,” the Mormonism, and worst of all, the dog on the roof rack incident are going to play well with the teabaggers, let alone normal people?  The Village may swoon, but that’s about it.

2) Ron Paul 10.51% Legalizing drugs and closing military bases?  Enough said.

3) Tim Pawlenty 7.61% Even this low showing isn’t low enough for this (male) Minnesota nitwit, who has accomplished approximately nothing, but will probably still be considered too liberal because he occasionally speaks in complete sentences and isn’t eligible to join AARP yet.

4) Sarah Palin 6.88% Submitted without comment.

5) Michele Bachmann 5.07% Recently Politifact awarded this cuckoo person the dubious honor of being America’s Lyingest Politician, which is indeed saying something.  Of the 13 times they checked her, her highest score, achieved six times, was “False.”  The seven others rated “Pants on Fire,” complete with a neat moving flame logo.  In response to this mild pillorying, Bachmann told her 14th lie.  And she’s crazy, too.  Also.

6) Jim DeMint 5.07% Like Romney, he looks the part, and has that soothing Confederate accent that soothes the party faithful.  Still, he got beaten by not one, but two girls, which can’t possibly go over well in coon-huntin’ country.

7) Herman Cain 3.99% Forgive me for not having heard of this great American, but it’s worth pointing out that he beat …..

Chris Christie 3.26% As America’s Most Unpleasant Fat Person, Christie has stepped into a big pair of shoes (and even bigger pants), and despite Chris Wallace’s schoolgirl crush on him, I don’t expect America to follow.  We like our fat people to be jolly.

9) Rick Santorum 3.26% Thank heaven that Dan Savage put that one to rest.  When will someone tell him?

10) Mitch Daniels 2.90% This genius was George W. Bush’s Budget Director, and we all saw how that turned out.  He’s also a Hoosier.

Sigh.  It would be nice, actually, if any one of these charlatans and/or cretins were capable of presenting an honest conservative argument in this upcoming battle, but they can’t….  Obama is actually quite conservative, and they are saddled with a base that thinks he’s a Kenyan Castro.  Watching the smarmy and despicable Eric Cantor dance around admitting birthers were crazy before that bulldog David Gregory this morning was actually painful; Republicans are stuck between a crazy rock and a corporate hard place, and they respond with a clown car like this.

If Obama is reelected in 2012, it won’t be his own doing.

“Comcast has not closed the transaction for NBC Universal and has no operational control at any of its properties, including MSNBC…  We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s news operations. We have not & we will not.”

(Statement hurriedly released by Comcast after they canned Keith Olbermann, their highest-rated host, Friday)

Well, that didn’t take long.  You might recognize that last part (in bold) from Iran/Contra; then as now it means, roughly, “Yeah, so what?  We won’t admit it next time, either.”  Reagan, having Alzheimer’s and all, might be forgiven for such a plain falsehood, but the sleazy pols and sleazier corporations who have trotted out this curiously constructed denial ever since know exactly what they’re doing.  Name the heinous or corrupt act committed, be it torture, spying on citizens, or what have you, and the have not/will not couplet, repeated endlessly, generally tides one over until Fox et al can come in and carpet-bomb the area with lies and and pearl-clutching in equal measure.  Don’t try this at home, though, unless you’re a powerful politician or a corporation who owns some; like polo or yachting, this isn’t a sport for the huddled masses.

The most sinister thing about MSNBC’s decision to dump Olbermann halfway through a $30 million four-year contract is that it is such a bad business decision; Olbermann’s intensely loyal fans, who essentially made MSNBC the network that beat CNN and is making gains on FOX,  have made their voices heard before, and they are, after all, MSNBC’s audience.  It’s hard to imagine Fox firing, say, Bill O’Reilly, with no real plan to replace him with anyone of similar stature in the time slot, and thus potentially losing ratings ground and viewer loyalty in the process.  But it’s also hard to imagine Bill O’Reilly ever doing anything to annoy his monopolistic overlords, much less going out quietly.

Comcast knows as well as anyone that having a liberal or two on the air, if it can dig your network out of the ratings basement, isn’t such a bad thing, but not good enough to hang onto when it annoys the plutocrats.  Better to have a gaffe-ridden Bozo like Chris Matthews or an insidery cipher like Lawrence O’Donnell…  In the unlikely event that they stray from the reservation, they can be easily brought to heel.  Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz provide color and a bit of passion, but neither have been known to leave marks on their targets, and having been made by MSNBC, are unlikely to cross it under new ownership.  Now that Comcast is a full-scale monopoly, vertically integrated and ready to squash the competition in other ways, it no longer cares what the ratings are in its tiny old News division, or what its paying customers want.  ”Whatever the traffic will bear”  and “the public be damned” are the cries of the new plutocracy, just as they were for the old.

The message to the reality-based community couldn’t be clearer, as a loyal Bushie (probably Karl Rove) said in the heady days of 2003, “We’re an empire now, and we create our own reality.”  Keith Olbermann provided an antidote to that barrage of lie-filled propaganda in those dark days, virtually alone in TV News, and he had the advantage of being right, to boot.  That sort of thing just isn’t done anymore; as the otherwise inexplicably still-employed David Gregory would be happy to explain to you, “That’s not our role.”  Comcast just reminded us of that, however sneakily, and I expect more reminders in the days and weeks ahead.

The ball got rolling back when Reagan’s FCC Chairman said, “A television is just a toaster with pictures.”  And now, Keith Olbermann, and with him, MSNBC, is the toast.  It was nice while it lasted.

Equally predictably, the media, in angelic harmony, waxed rhapsodic about this supposedly epoch-changing event as though it were anything more than the logical conclusion of the Citizens United decision, wherein corporations were allowed to openly buy the Congress, thus restoring the same thieving scumbags voters tossed out for their rank corruption and incompetence just two years ago.  Time and again, the laughably ridiculous notion that the “American People” had somehow demanded to sacrifice their well-being, health, and future to a bunch of bigoted, lying know-nothings who plan to rob them blind was repeated as though it were so by the pampered nitwits of the media.

It’s all eerily familiar, isn’t it?  The same bunch who compared George W. Bush to Winston Churchill when any fool could see he was closer to Colonel Klink, and showered hossanahs on David Petraeus for his “victories” in the costly and debilitating failures of Iraq and Afghanistan would naturally be inclined to see the elevation, via an unprecedented tsunami of secret corporate money, of a drunken sleazeball like John Boehner as yet another Great Moment in History.  It is, but not in the way they intend.  Don’t tell Chris Matthews, David Gregory, or Andrea Mitchell et al, but the Republicans discovered long ago that they couldn’t win elections honestly, so they’ve come up with a better idea, and it’s working, to a point.

After the chastening experience of 2000, when despite fawning coverage of the absurdly unqualified Bush and relentlessly brutal treatment of the only competent nominee, Al Gore, Republicans still lost the popular vote, they swung into action; starting wars, packing courts, and what have you, to create a “permanent”  (read: manufactured) majority for themselves.  Finally, with Citizens United under their belts thanks to two Supreme Court appointees willing to perjure themselves to get confirmed, Republicans thought they had found a way around the pesky obstacle of actually getting elected, repeatedly, regardless of performance.

Well, now it’s time to perform, and that’s always the sticky wicket.  Republican governance, after all, is always about looting the treasury to reward their benefactors at the expense of everyone else, and they’re victims of their own success at this rather expensive endeavor.  Even after he’s had a few, and his orange color starts to get tear-streaked, ol’ Boner still knows that the Military Industrial complex, the banksters, and Big Oil don’t like their welfare checks to bounce, so he’s already in a pickle with the teabaggers about raising the debt ceiling.  And there will be hell to pay amongst the geriatric, primary-voting Fox audience if Social Security and Medicare are cut, so he’s going to have to come up with an improbably large amount of money from what, the Forest Service?  It always seemed unlikely, at least to those of us not in the media.

What will happen, of course, is that the new Republican House, to steal another election, has written a whole lot of checks its benefactors won’t let it cash, so despite being sworn in, unprecedentedly, by our supposedly non-partisan Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John “balls and strikes” Roberts, this crowd will immediately revert to the ol’ Dick Cheney “deficits don’t matter” mantra faster  than Boehner can slam down a double scotch at last call, and Fox News will tie itself in knots trying to explain how this sudden turnaround is Necessary and Right.  Good luck with that.

Best of all, the media-created ticker tape parade for the Republicans has gotten so out of hand that the utterly bonkers Michele Bachmann is talking about running for President in 2012, and another selfless arbiter of Equal Justice, Antonin Scalia, has offered himself up to help that cuckoo back-bencher teach evidently benighted Americans about the Constitution.  It’s going to be an interesting two years at the rate we’re going, since regardless of politics, nobody likes a crying drunk, and now one is House Speaker.

Bring it on.

In light of the Wikileaks fiasco, I’ve gotten to thinking a lot about good ol’ Ike, who chose to use his final speech as President, a mere two and a half minutes long, to warn America that we’d end up, well, how we have ended up if we didn’t watch out.  Clearly, we didn’t watch out.  We have given up both liberty and prosperity to fatten America’s War Industry, which is, globally, about the last place where our products still rule, and the threat to Democracy  Ike warned so darkly about is no longer some faint, distant possibility, but a plain fact we live with each day.  Both parties are War Parties now, and America only survives, albeit haltingly, on war.

Take our media….  Please.  Stung by the reality of their death-dealing credulity over the last decade, the pancaked know-nothings that pollute the airwaves are in angelic unison touching manicured hands to their fevered foreheads at the audacity, the noive, if you speak Bugs Bunny, of people they don’t even know, like that Assange person, running around behind their backs and committing actual journalism.  Everyone who’s anyone knows that sort of thing simply isn’t done anymore; it’s all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted these days, which is quite evidently a lot less work than that old way.  (see Gregory, David and Mitchell, Andrea, just for starters…)

I have to wonder what would happen on the Sunday talk shows today had, say, President Obama delivered something like Eisenhower’s 1961 speech.  Naturally, the panel would include Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and/or David Brooks, with maybe Joe Lieberman for balance.  Ike’s words, though demonstrably true, would have gone over like a fart in church in that crowd, whose very existence in such a public square not only owes itself to the military industrial complex, but to the complete capture of the purported Fourth Estate by it.

It was inevitable, really, that virtually all government spending would eventually end up in the hands of the military; no other government function is so immune to oversight and performance review, and like a bunch of Willie Suttons (selling guns instead of toting them), the sharp operators went where the money was.  You see, unlike the previous plutocrats the government lavishly sponsored from the railroad, oil, and infrastructure industries, the war industry doesn’t even have to do anything to scoop up deficit-financed dollars by the truckload; the tedious tasks of, say building a dam or a bridge that won’t fall down or getting an actual product to market have been completely eliminated.  They’ve already gone Galt, simply taking the money and running, leaving the corpses behind.  Ike, who unlike the chickenhawks of today abhorred war as one who experienced it must, saw the danger and tried to warn us, but was utterly drowned out by the  McNamaras, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Powells, (and the medal-hungry generals who served them) in the ensuing decades.

Now, we’re faced with increasing economic hardship and dire  predictions of national doom without so-called austerity for everyone but the richest, but yet the half of our “discretionary” budget that goes to fighting failed and never-ending wars remains so sacrosanct that only Ron Paul and a few lefty Democrats in congress dare to question it, even as poll after poll shows that most Americans want the wars to stop, now.  The media religiously gloss over this inconvenient truth, in increasingly crazy and obvious ways, of which Wikileaks is only the most recent example.

Just as Eisenhower predicted way back in 1961, the military industrial complex would, if left unchecked, first destroy our Democracy, and then go on to destroy our prosperity.  While Ike may have spent more time on the golf course than President Obama (despite what you hear on Fox), he clearly did a little more thinking out there.

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

–Col. Dave Lapan, Pentagon spokesman (with a straight face…)

The Pentagon, which devours about half of the US budget Defending our Freedom, has “asked” the news media if it would refrain from publishing the latest Wikileaks documents, ostensibly out of a sudden concern with the credibility of the media.  Yes, you read that right.  They’re pleading with the same media who relentlessly promoted the Iraq War, The “War on Terror,” and the “Axis of Evil,” among other stupid, misguided notions of the Bush Era, while unanimously dismissing opponents of torture, wiretapping, war, and indefinite detention as naive and unSerious, despite the fact that they were right.  The same shockingly discredited media that gave us Judith Miller, Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius, Jonah Goldberg, David Gregory, and on and on is now supposed to be worried about how crossing the Pentagon, for once, might damage its credibility, and thus should keep mum.  What they’re asking is kind of like asking a fish to swim, but the Pentagon’s doing it anyway.  They have a lot of taxpayer-funded spokesmen to keep busy, after all.

But why bother?  The media has fallen hook, line. and sinker for every cockamamie idea that has bubbled up from the bowels of the Pentagon swamp for twenty years; from the Kuwaiti Incubators to the Aluminum Tubes, from Star Wars to Suitcase nukes, no phony pretext was too ridiculous for the mainstream media to toss credibility to the wind and type up whatever some shadowy Pentagon flack said, however often such errant hogwash was initially disputed and subsequently disproven.  Last time the Pentagon had this sort of Wikileaks-related Depends Moment, just this summer, all of its wild threats proved utterly false, but the media published them anyway, basically ignoring what the leaks contained.  There is no evidence that they won’t do so again, but I guess if you’re the Pentagon, and your whole world is a spinning kaleidoscope of imaginary fears, even this one might sound plausible.

Trouble is, the Pentagon has achieved “full spectrum dominance” when it comes to the US media, if not in the real world, where since World War II it loses all its wars, so such dire entreaties are as silly as they are unnecessary.  Nobody at the Pentagon seriously thinks that, say, the New York Times, which obligingly withheld Bush’s warrantless wiretapping until his 2004 reelection was safely past, will suddenly find something the the 400,ooo pages of documents with which to bedevil the war machine.  Nobody expects the Washington Post, no further introduction necessary, to print anything that might send Halliburton or Blackwater stock plummeting.  Everyone knows that on TV, war sells and peace leads to poor ratings, no matter the country/cause/pretext du jour.  What, pray, is the Pentagon pretending, this time, to be afraid of?

The answer lies, I think, in the latter half of the quote above, which is unintentionally (of course) revealing….   The Pentagon has, in effect, gone all Alaska on us.  Like Senate candidate Joe Miller, who had private thugs “arrest” and handcuff an impertinent reporter, and Sarah Palin, who blames the “lamestream media” for making her look like the dangerous idiot she is, the by far largest “branch” of our supposedly Democratic government is out to destroy the credibility of any media source, however tiny and inconsequential, who dares to question them.  When you’re a hillbilly grifter attempting to ride a wave of corporate-funded paranoia to Washington, that’s one thing.  When you’re annually gobbling up $700 billion of money we don’t have creating morally indefensible violence and resentment the world over and calling it “defense,” it’s quite another.  The media have been dutifully ignoring this rather simple fact for many years; indeed, whatever “credibility” they might hope to retain depends on their willingness to cover up their many past errors, incurred mostly by believing the Pentagon, so their interests, once adversarial, have become one.

At one time, the news media felt a responsibility, however often in the breach, to dig beneath shady official pronouncements, and found it both satisfying and economically advantageous to expose official lies; in short, they had credibility, and sometimes even used it, notably during the Pentagon Papers case, when several newspaper publishers risked jail publishing what the military always calls “classified” documents about its deceitfulness and egregious crimes against humanity.

That time has passed, and someone ought to tell the Pentagon to try something else.  Unlike the rest of America, they can afford to lavishly, and perhaps effectively, sell almost anything…   Anything but credibility, that is.