FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 13, Parts 1 & 2
Number 13, Parts 1 & 2
(NEW SERIES—2007)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
THE
PERNICIOUS HYPOCRISY
OF FRANK RICH
OF THE
NEW YORK TIMES
Part One
THE
PERNICIOUS HYPOCRISY
OF FRANK RICH
OF THE
NEW YORK TIMES
Part One
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
................................................................................
................................................................................Today the US media serves as propaganda ministry for the
................................................................................government's wars and police state.
....................................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "Conservatism Isn't What It Used To Be"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 7, 2007)
................................................................................ We have rendered the nation deaf and dumb. We no longer
................................................................................have the capacity for empathy.
....................................................................................................—Chris Hedges, "Iran, the Next Quagmire"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 4, 2007)
................................................................................Remedy: In order to turn this trend around, the people of the
................................................................................US must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian traits of empathy
................................................................................and engagement.
....................................................................................................—Phil Rockstrohe, "Q and A for the People of a Forsaken Republic"
....................................................................................................(October 2, 2007)
................................................................................Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile,
................................................................................criminal, or delusional?
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen, "Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 3
....................................................................................................(July 29, 2007)
................................................................................Today the US media serves as propaganda ministry for the
................................................................................government's wars and police state.
....................................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "Conservatism Isn't What It Used To Be"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 7, 2007)
................................................................................ We have rendered the nation deaf and dumb. We no longer
................................................................................have the capacity for empathy.
....................................................................................................—Chris Hedges, "Iran, the Next Quagmire"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 4, 2007)
................................................................................Remedy: In order to turn this trend around, the people of the
................................................................................US must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian traits of empathy
................................................................................and engagement.
....................................................................................................—Phil Rockstrohe, "Q and A for the People of a Forsaken Republic"
....................................................................................................(October 2, 2007)
................................................................................Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile,
................................................................................criminal, or delusional?
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen, "Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 3
....................................................................................................(July 29, 2007)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
1
..........
..........Just imagine this for a moment. Imagine that you could actually set aside the fear of and the burning hatred for the fraudulent, treasonous, and criminal leadership of the United States that any normal thinking citizen should be feeling right now. Imagine that you could set those feelings aside—maybe thanks to a sudden certainty that someone—inside the military, perhaps—really will prevent the Bush-Cheney junta from perpetrating, sometime between now and November 2008, another 9/11 followed by a declaration of national emergency and the locking down of us all down in a perfect and perfectly prepared-for police state. All of that, as if it needs saying, so that they could, happily unhindered by us, go about their adolescent games of bombing much of the middle east into oblivion in order to "save" it for oil.
..........I myself devoutly wish I could do exactly that, that I really could have faith in a good outcome and could therefore set aside my present terror, fear, hatred, and rage.
..........I can't, though, knowing that it would be irresponsible because I would become immediately less alert. But I can pretend to do it, at least for a long enough time to get this piece written, under its title of "The Special and Poisonous Hypocrisy of Frank Rich."
..........That is to say, I am now embarking upon the writing not solely of a political but also of a literary essay. And I'm doing so even as I continue to fear every new move of Cheney's reptilian brain or every new deep-psychotic-triggered tic in The Boy's behavior that might incline him the more readily to "Cut the Big One," as the wonderfully clear-sighted and strong-hearted Sheila Samples put it.
..........Literary essay, did I hear someone snicker? Did I hear someone say, Ha! with scorn? Did I hear someone ask, Don't I remember "Lapis Lazuli," written in another year of dread and fear, 1938? And have I forgotten the start of the poem, where the argument is relayed that the arts are of no conceivable use or importance at a time when the realities of destruction and war loom? To wit:
............................................................I have heard that hysterical women say
............................................................They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
............................................................Of poets that are always gay,
............................................................For everybody knows or else should know
............................................................That if nothing drastic is done
............................................................Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
............................................................Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
............................................................Until the town lie beaten flat.
..........All true enough. But that's only the start of the poem. It continues, and as it does, Yeats produces a great and eloquent Nay, explaining that the arts remain just as important (how important? absolutely important) in time of threat and dread as at any other, and that even if world were about to end, even "should the last scene be there, / The great stage curtain about to drop," even then those who "perform their tragic" roles,
............................................................If worthy their prominent part in the play,
............................................................Do not break up their lines to weep.
.........."If worthy their prominent part. . . " I'm interested, as I've been my entire adult life, in knowing and emulating what it is that makes a person "worthy" in the sense that Yeats means here—and elsewhere. Reading the whole poem is always useful for anyone with an interest like mine. But the worthiness question aside, it's obvious—isn't it?—that if you've got a heart as big as Yeats', then you're going to see to it that the arts be made to stick around no matter what. And, I might add, you're going to do all you can to make them stick around without their degenerating into the shallow, the cheap, or the political—as they've so largely done in our poor soulless Age of Simplification—but instead you're going to see to it that they stick around the way they're supposed to and the way they must: Big and grand and bold and high and essential to the heart, the self, and the mind.
..........Ah, yes, grand thoughts. My heart be with the old poets,¹ that's my view, as it's been since I was a student. And that's the reason why, even though the Bushiscti may be about to spark the blinding world-white-flash any second now ("The great stage curtain [be] about to drop"), even though they may be about to fill "this excellent canopy, the air"² with cancerous malignancy and the dust of death—all for the sake of their snake-skin wallets and their phallo-centric-boys' greed-lust—well, that's the reason why, in spite of my terror at what the boy-bastards might do next, I'm nevertheless going to embark on a big and grand and bold and high literary essay. And it's going to take on a big subject.
..........Namely? Well, in general, the subject will be those hundreds of thousands of men and women throughout the media who out-Faustus Faustus³ in their having made a pact with Mephostophilis himself although for what end I have no clear idea, other than to destroy the republic and bring ruinous harm to the globe and perhaps an end to us all. Whatever their reason, these legions and armies of men and women putatively serving the nation's people have agreed—against ethics, against morality, against decency, against good—on a full-time basis to lie, deceive, occlude, obfuscate, distort, twist, ignore, to do anything, in short, so long as it's not tell or speak or reveal to regular American people the least iota of simple plain truth about the secret, hidden, rogue, or "overworld" government that's now malevolently and maliciously determining life-and-death matters for us all on the local, the regional, the national, and the international level. See Peter Dale Scott's The Road to 9/11 for the most recent of the several indisputably important scholarly analyses of this awful truth.
..........But back to those in the media. Liars on so massive a scale as we see among media people today-such absolutely enormous numbers of hypocrites and liars all busy at one concerted task may be a thing unprecedented in human history-outside, I quickly add, of organized religion. On top of the enormity in pure numbers, those among them who are actually on air or in print (not to mention their writers and producers and packagers) are so practiced and so devoted in employing their deceit that these wretched liars very, very often are able to deceive so skillfully and so subtly that they actually cause their audiences to experience both gratitude and an increasing fidelity to those very liars who are lying to them, who are misleading them, and who are blinding them to the truth of 9/11 and thus the truth of the malicious, dangerous, anti-Constitutional government that now has us under its control. Shhh. Some quiet and respect, please. We're going to talk about "poverty," perhaps, or "gender issues" or "women's rights" or "electoral reform," etc., etc.—but, however reverently the "progressive" media people bow their heads to these "good" and "humane" and "democratic" and "fairness-centered" topics or "issues," all of it—in light of the huge true and present danger-is nothing more than fluff, it's chaff in the wind, it's like those diversionary aluminum strips that used to be tossed into the high atmosphere to confuse radar by functioning as false targets, thus diverting enemy predators from aircraft. It's snake oil. It's hokum. It's all used as diversion from the one huge lie of omission, of towering importance. The truth is that none of those subjects matters a hoot in light of the far more enormous and more pressing truth that, thanks to the domestic policy of our present junta-"leadership," we're about to lose the entire republic itself and all our freedoms while our malignant and malicious "government"—a government that can be halted only and solely by the exposure of 9/11 truth—embarks upon its further plans not only for implementing the domestic prison-state but for achieving the even greater prison-state of permanent global war.
..........In a situation such as that—such as at present we're all in—to lie about 9/11 truth—commission or omission—seems to me treasonous against the republic, against the Constitution, and against the American people.
..........To speak of such things is to speak of enormities. But it is also to speak the simple, plain truth. We are in a state of emergency such as our republic has never before in, and we are being lied to about it, massively and absolutely, by the entirety of that very element of socio-political society that at one time in history was the indispensable freedom-preserving element—namely, the "Fourth Estate," now become "propaganda ministry for the government's wars and police state."
..........That the Fourth Estate is now our most vile enemy-more vile, by merit of being willingly subservient to it, even than the traitorous and putrescent overworld government it perversely nourishes, a government determined to imprison us all.
..........To say such things—to say them because they're true—is, indeed, an enormity. So much so that it seems to me it would be a good idea, like taking a breath of fresh air, to put, at this point, another section-number on the page.
..........Just imagine this for a moment. Imagine that you could actually set aside the fear of and the burning hatred for the fraudulent, treasonous, and criminal leadership of the United States that any normal thinking citizen should be feeling right now. Imagine that you could set those feelings aside—maybe thanks to a sudden certainty that someone—inside the military, perhaps—really will prevent the Bush-Cheney junta from perpetrating, sometime between now and November 2008, another 9/11 followed by a declaration of national emergency and the locking down of us all down in a perfect and perfectly prepared-for police state. All of that, as if it needs saying, so that they could, happily unhindered by us, go about their adolescent games of bombing much of the middle east into oblivion in order to "save" it for oil.
..........I myself devoutly wish I could do exactly that, that I really could have faith in a good outcome and could therefore set aside my present terror, fear, hatred, and rage.
..........I can't, though, knowing that it would be irresponsible because I would become immediately less alert. But I can pretend to do it, at least for a long enough time to get this piece written, under its title of "The Special and Poisonous Hypocrisy of Frank Rich."
..........That is to say, I am now embarking upon the writing not solely of a political but also of a literary essay. And I'm doing so even as I continue to fear every new move of Cheney's reptilian brain or every new deep-psychotic-triggered tic in The Boy's behavior that might incline him the more readily to "Cut the Big One," as the wonderfully clear-sighted and strong-hearted Sheila Samples put it.
..........Literary essay, did I hear someone snicker? Did I hear someone say, Ha! with scorn? Did I hear someone ask, Don't I remember "Lapis Lazuli," written in another year of dread and fear, 1938? And have I forgotten the start of the poem, where the argument is relayed that the arts are of no conceivable use or importance at a time when the realities of destruction and war loom? To wit:
............................................................I have heard that hysterical women say
............................................................They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
............................................................Of poets that are always gay,
............................................................For everybody knows or else should know
............................................................That if nothing drastic is done
............................................................Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
............................................................Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
............................................................Until the town lie beaten flat.
..........All true enough. But that's only the start of the poem. It continues, and as it does, Yeats produces a great and eloquent Nay, explaining that the arts remain just as important (how important? absolutely important) in time of threat and dread as at any other, and that even if world were about to end, even "should the last scene be there, / The great stage curtain about to drop," even then those who "perform their tragic" roles,
............................................................If worthy their prominent part in the play,
............................................................Do not break up their lines to weep.
.........."If worthy their prominent part. . . " I'm interested, as I've been my entire adult life, in knowing and emulating what it is that makes a person "worthy" in the sense that Yeats means here—and elsewhere. Reading the whole poem is always useful for anyone with an interest like mine. But the worthiness question aside, it's obvious—isn't it?—that if you've got a heart as big as Yeats', then you're going to see to it that the arts be made to stick around no matter what. And, I might add, you're going to do all you can to make them stick around without their degenerating into the shallow, the cheap, or the political—as they've so largely done in our poor soulless Age of Simplification—but instead you're going to see to it that they stick around the way they're supposed to and the way they must: Big and grand and bold and high and essential to the heart, the self, and the mind.
..........Ah, yes, grand thoughts. My heart be with the old poets,¹ that's my view, as it's been since I was a student. And that's the reason why, even though the Bushiscti may be about to spark the blinding world-white-flash any second now ("The great stage curtain [be] about to drop"), even though they may be about to fill "this excellent canopy, the air"² with cancerous malignancy and the dust of death—all for the sake of their snake-skin wallets and their phallo-centric-boys' greed-lust—well, that's the reason why, in spite of my terror at what the boy-bastards might do next, I'm nevertheless going to embark on a big and grand and bold and high literary essay. And it's going to take on a big subject.
..........Namely? Well, in general, the subject will be those hundreds of thousands of men and women throughout the media who out-Faustus Faustus³ in their having made a pact with Mephostophilis himself although for what end I have no clear idea, other than to destroy the republic and bring ruinous harm to the globe and perhaps an end to us all. Whatever their reason, these legions and armies of men and women putatively serving the nation's people have agreed—against ethics, against morality, against decency, against good—on a full-time basis to lie, deceive, occlude, obfuscate, distort, twist, ignore, to do anything, in short, so long as it's not tell or speak or reveal to regular American people the least iota of simple plain truth about the secret, hidden, rogue, or "overworld" government that's now malevolently and maliciously determining life-and-death matters for us all on the local, the regional, the national, and the international level. See Peter Dale Scott's The Road to 9/11 for the most recent of the several indisputably important scholarly analyses of this awful truth.
..........But back to those in the media. Liars on so massive a scale as we see among media people today-such absolutely enormous numbers of hypocrites and liars all busy at one concerted task may be a thing unprecedented in human history-outside, I quickly add, of organized religion. On top of the enormity in pure numbers, those among them who are actually on air or in print (not to mention their writers and producers and packagers) are so practiced and so devoted in employing their deceit that these wretched liars very, very often are able to deceive so skillfully and so subtly that they actually cause their audiences to experience both gratitude and an increasing fidelity to those very liars who are lying to them, who are misleading them, and who are blinding them to the truth of 9/11 and thus the truth of the malicious, dangerous, anti-Constitutional government that now has us under its control. Shhh. Some quiet and respect, please. We're going to talk about "poverty," perhaps, or "gender issues" or "women's rights" or "electoral reform," etc., etc.—but, however reverently the "progressive" media people bow their heads to these "good" and "humane" and "democratic" and "fairness-centered" topics or "issues," all of it—in light of the huge true and present danger-is nothing more than fluff, it's chaff in the wind, it's like those diversionary aluminum strips that used to be tossed into the high atmosphere to confuse radar by functioning as false targets, thus diverting enemy predators from aircraft. It's snake oil. It's hokum. It's all used as diversion from the one huge lie of omission, of towering importance. The truth is that none of those subjects matters a hoot in light of the far more enormous and more pressing truth that, thanks to the domestic policy of our present junta-"leadership," we're about to lose the entire republic itself and all our freedoms while our malignant and malicious "government"—a government that can be halted only and solely by the exposure of 9/11 truth—embarks upon its further plans not only for implementing the domestic prison-state but for achieving the even greater prison-state of permanent global war.
..........In a situation such as that—such as at present we're all in—to lie about 9/11 truth—commission or omission—seems to me treasonous against the republic, against the Constitution, and against the American people.
..........To speak of such things is to speak of enormities. But it is also to speak the simple, plain truth. We are in a state of emergency such as our republic has never before in, and we are being lied to about it, massively and absolutely, by the entirety of that very element of socio-political society that at one time in history was the indispensable freedom-preserving element—namely, the "Fourth Estate," now become "propaganda ministry for the government's wars and police state."
..........That the Fourth Estate is now our most vile enemy-more vile, by merit of being willingly subservient to it, even than the traitorous and putrescent overworld government it perversely nourishes, a government determined to imprison us all.
..........To say such things—to say them because they're true—is, indeed, an enormity. So much so that it seems to me it would be a good idea, like taking a breath of fresh air, to put, at this point, another section-number on the page.
2
..........
..........The entire phenomenon of a lying media, then, will be my general subject. I've written about this before, not only in A Nation Gone Blind itself, but also in later pieces like my recent piece on Amy Goodman. That subject—of the overall media—will remain in the background, however, by merit of its being already so familiar to anyone likely to be a reader of this present essay. If I'm wrong about that in the case of anyone, I'd urge a look at A Nation Gone Blind.
..........My specific subject, on the other hand, will be a single and very powerful person who is at work within the media. That person is the outstandingly sophisticated master of mendacity who deceives for The New York Times op-ed page on Sundays, Frank Rich. I have chosen Rich in part, of course, because of his eminence and extremely high profile, and because these aspects of the writer serve to make him all the more repugnant in his effectiveness as a betrayer and misleader of the people. That he so willingly works to help keep in power the malignant and pernicious "leaders" who in turn seem aiming to destroy us—such apparent zeal raises him both in interest and in repugnance. That he does his work with so apparently a perfect absence of the agenbite of inwit makes him simultaneously fascinating and abominable, as does the fact additionally that he does his treasonous work while, with masterly success, leading his benighted readers to believe that he's actually telling the truth and serving their best interests.
..........Before we get to specific analyses of Rich's writing, though, I think I should clarify two points that I consider axiomatic and that will help show why I consider the matter at hand—our lying media—to be a matter so extremely, almost absolutely, important.
..........After following six years' worth of study on the part of many gifted and dedicated scholars and writers, and after four years of study on my own part, I take it as a proper, just, and correct view, a view that would be taken by any intelligent, genuinely thinking, and seriously observant person, that the events of 9/11 indeed were, in Carolyn Baker's words, "pre-meditated mass murder by the United States government."
..........Exactly what elements of "government" executed the crimes is still inexactly known. Almost certainly, it was a "shadow" or "rogue" element, as Webster G. Tarpley calls it in his brilliant 2005 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA or an "overworld" element, as Peter Dale Scott calls it in his new and extremely important study, The Road to 9/11.
..........But although it may not yet be known precisely what domestic United States elements perpetrated the 9/11 crimes, still some elements did do it. And now, with that said, I come to the second point that I consider axiomatic and that, again, should help show the importance of the subject of the lying media. This point has two parts or steps to it, and the first has to do with what the purpose of the 9/11 murders and building-destructions was. And it's now irrefutable that the purpose to scare and intimidate the American people so badly that they would permit their "leaders" to use any methods they wished in order to "protect" the republic and its people from the enemy that "attacked" them on 9/11. That this "enemy" was fictional and the attack self-created and self-inflicted didn't then matter. Americans were scared enough to believe that the enemy was real, and our criminal leaders immediately scared them further by making use of a frightening name, "Terrorism." Thus the "War on Terrorism" was born out of falsehood and lies. The plan went forward to strip Americans of their civil and Constitutional liberties at home, and to wage unjust and illegal war without hindrance abroad.
..........The entire phenomenon of a lying media, then, will be my general subject. I've written about this before, not only in A Nation Gone Blind itself, but also in later pieces like my recent piece on Amy Goodman. That subject—of the overall media—will remain in the background, however, by merit of its being already so familiar to anyone likely to be a reader of this present essay. If I'm wrong about that in the case of anyone, I'd urge a look at A Nation Gone Blind.
..........My specific subject, on the other hand, will be a single and very powerful person who is at work within the media. That person is the outstandingly sophisticated master of mendacity who deceives for The New York Times op-ed page on Sundays, Frank Rich. I have chosen Rich in part, of course, because of his eminence and extremely high profile, and because these aspects of the writer serve to make him all the more repugnant in his effectiveness as a betrayer and misleader of the people. That he so willingly works to help keep in power the malignant and pernicious "leaders" who in turn seem aiming to destroy us—such apparent zeal raises him both in interest and in repugnance. That he does his work with so apparently a perfect absence of the agenbite of inwit makes him simultaneously fascinating and abominable, as does the fact additionally that he does his treasonous work while, with masterly success, leading his benighted readers to believe that he's actually telling the truth and serving their best interests.
..........Before we get to specific analyses of Rich's writing, though, I think I should clarify two points that I consider axiomatic and that will help show why I consider the matter at hand—our lying media—to be a matter so extremely, almost absolutely, important.
..........After following six years' worth of study on the part of many gifted and dedicated scholars and writers, and after four years of study on my own part, I take it as a proper, just, and correct view, a view that would be taken by any intelligent, genuinely thinking, and seriously observant person, that the events of 9/11 indeed were, in Carolyn Baker's words, "pre-meditated mass murder by the United States government."
..........Exactly what elements of "government" executed the crimes is still inexactly known. Almost certainly, it was a "shadow" or "rogue" element, as Webster G. Tarpley calls it in his brilliant 2005 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA or an "overworld" element, as Peter Dale Scott calls it in his new and extremely important study, The Road to 9/11.
..........But although it may not yet be known precisely what domestic United States elements perpetrated the 9/11 crimes, still some elements did do it. And now, with that said, I come to the second point that I consider axiomatic and that, again, should help show the importance of the subject of the lying media. This point has two parts or steps to it, and the first has to do with what the purpose of the 9/11 murders and building-destructions was. And it's now irrefutable that the purpose to scare and intimidate the American people so badly that they would permit their "leaders" to use any methods they wished in order to "protect" the republic and its people from the enemy that "attacked" them on 9/11. That this "enemy" was fictional and the attack self-created and self-inflicted didn't then matter. Americans were scared enough to believe that the enemy was real, and our criminal leaders immediately scared them further by making use of a frightening name, "Terrorism." Thus the "War on Terrorism" was born out of falsehood and lies. The plan went forward to strip Americans of their civil and Constitutional liberties at home, and to wage unjust and illegal war without hindrance abroad.
·
..........The first step in the point I take as axiomatic, then, is that 9/11, a fraud through and through, was the visible starting point of—and the faked excuse for—a concerted program of reactionism, theft, treason, crime, and illegal, unchecked global militarism.
..........The second part of the point I take as axiomatic is very simple and I think indisputable. The Bush junta is responsible now for a six-year-long string of crimes. That it has proven itself unstoppable for that length of time is a grim gift that we owe thanks for to a corrupt, bought-off, and complicit congress that has either approved or at the very least failed to hold the junta accountable for a single one of those crimes—with the exception of one very, very, very important crime, the crime that made all the subsequent crimes possible, namely, of course, 9/11.
..........This is why I said before (and got most confusedly "criticized" for) and why I say again that only the exposure of the truth about 9/11, followed by appropriate measures holding accountable those responsible for the crimes of 9/11 or for enabling those crimes (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Air Force general Richard Myers, just for three) or abetting them (Giuliani, Rice, and Powell, just for three more).
..........One of the significant things about this point—that 9/11 truth alone can slow the junta, make it accountable for its crimes, or end it—is that six years is long enough to prove that no established branch of government or of law inside the United States is going to expose this truth or begin prosecutions because of it. Therefore? Therefore, the job must be done—and can be done only—by the nation's people.
..........The central facts of the case in the heinous and witheringly cold-blooded 9/11 crimes, in spite of certain remaining unknowns, are evident, transparent, and eminently provable. Any thinking, reading, intelligent, and observant person can discover this inexpressibly important fact simply by taking the time and mustering the interest to familiarize him- or herself with even some of the essential scholarly work that has been done on the history, the truth, and the facts of 9/11.
..........The situation is this: Nothing less than a third of the population of the U.S. doubts the "official" story about 9/11 and either suspects or is convinced that 9/11 was an "inside job." Even though a person wishes it were two-thirds instead of one, this number is momentous and significant.
..........Let's hypothesize for a moment how we might reasonably classify the American population into the smallest number of groups possible without there being overlap among them. This is a good and useful exercise in rhetoric, thought, and logic of the kind once included during fall semesters in English 101 classrooms all over the land but is now as likely to go untouched. I'm going to propose, given our interest here and now, that all Americans can be distinguished as belonging to one of three groups, and that these groups will be distinct from one another yet will leave no one out. Hence:
..............................1) Thinking and observant Americans.
..............................2) Blind Americans, those for whom the media determine most
..............................if not all "reality" (cf. A Nation Gone Blind)
..............................3) Bought, guilty, complicit Americans, those who continue to
..............................deny and suppress 9/11 truth while at the same time knowing
..............................that truth.
..........Anyone who went through a good English 101 course knows that these groups need not be and very likely will not be equal or anywhere near equal in the number of their members. And that's true here. The likelihood is that Group 2 will be the largest, since the polls telling us that one-third of Americans embrace or lean toward 9/11 truth suggest simultaneously that two-thirds don't. It follows that that two thirds must be the less-informed, the less-observant, the less-inquisitive two thirds. I'm going to call them "blind."
..........And so where does this leave us? Two thirds of Americans—roughly—are blind. One third of Americans—roughly—is thinking, observant, and inquisitive. This means that only the leftovers fill up Group 3, making it clearly, patently, and obviously the smallest group of the three. And yet, though the smallest, it is also—as things stand now—the most powerful.
..........It's the most powerful, and it's also the group that could be renamed the group of liars, the group of deceivers, the group of falsifiers and repressors, the group of those who are complicit in the crimes of 9/11 by merit of hiding the truth of those crimes, the group of those who are treasonous by merit of covering up known crimes of treason, and, finally, they could be renamed the group of explicit enemies against the entirety of Group one, while simultaneously being implicit enemies of all of Group two (even though those in Group two don't know that, since they don't understand that those in Group 3 are liars but believe them to be truth-tellers).
..........And exactly who is in the criminal Group 3? Well, Amy Goodman is in it, Frank Rich is in it, Nancy Pelosi is in it, Harry Reid is in it, John Conyers is in it, all the media people I mentioned before as choosing to be liars are in it, Adolph Giuliani is in it, Elliot Spitzer is in it and Larry Silverstein is in it—and so on. See also here.
..........In short, members of the Bush administration, members of the houses of congress, and the huge numbers of people who work in the mainstream media—these are the members of Group 3. What do you suppose their actual numbers come to? How many of them do you suppose there really are? Well, there are one hundred in the Senate and 433 in the House for a total of 533. What shall we say for the number of people constituting the Bush administration, including cabinet members, close advisors, ambassadors, and so on? How about five hundred, for a running total now of 1,033. And how many work in the mainstream media, print, video, and radio—including NPR, Pacifica, and the like? Let's estimate that those working in or near the editorial side of the media come to something like 25,000, including everybody from the tiniest little radio stations in the tiniest little towns, every reporter in every paper, every advisor in every station, every announcer, every editor, every columnist. If we're at all close, we've got a total now for the membership of Group 3 that comes to 26,033.
..........Now we've got to add every corporate owner of the media, the membership of every corporate board that controls the media, and every head of and influential staff in pertinent agencies from, say, the FCC on through the Motion Picture Association of America.
..........Let's say there are a thousand people—-a well-dressed yet reptilian in-group of schmoozers and their like-minded "friends" who make up among themselves the membership of all the most important corporate boards in America. That means we're up to 27,033. Let's triple—no, let's quadruple—the total just to be sure we've got everyone, including high elements of the military and of the numerous intelligence agencies. Quadrupling gives us a grand total of 108,132.
..........Now. Those hundred-thousand people—they're our enemies. They're the obvious enemies of Group 1 and, as I suggested, the enemies also of Group 2, though Group 2 doesn't know it.
..........What do you think? Let's say there are 300,000,000 people in the U.S. We know already that 100,000,000 of them are in Group 1 and either know, suspect, or lean toward 9/11 Truth. Even leaving Group 2 out of the argument for the moment, that suggests that 100,000,000 people are being held hostage by 108,132!
..........I, for one, hate being ruled by gangs. I, for one, hate being ruled by thuggery. I, for one, hate being ruled by deceit, deception, cover-up, lies, thievery, criminality, treason, and fraud. I, for one, hate the "left gatekeepers," some of whom you can see as listed here by the great Barrie Zwicker in his equally great book, Towers of Deception.
..........I, for one, agree with Zwicker when he writes (on pp. 238-239 of Towers of Deception) that
..............................Revealing the fraud of 9/11 in my opinion is the single most important
..............................task faced by civilization today. That it was dared is the supreme
..............................Achilles heel of the Fourth Reich. If enough people could be awakened
..............................to the enormity of the crime, and who its perpetrators are, they
..............................become a politically-relevant constituency. Then the possibility of
..............................a cleansing transformation would emerge. [emphasis added] Every
..............................worthwhile initiative you can name, be it environmental, social, pol-
..............................itical or economic, would benefit from politically-relevant exposure
..............................of the Great Deception.
..........I agree also with Webster Tarpley when he writes the following:
........................................But as long as Bush can keep his base of 30-35% of the US
..............................population, he can wage war in Iraq indefinitely, and possibly widen
..............................that war to Syria and Iran. Bush's hold on his base is due largely
..............................to the power of the 9/11 myth over certain parts of the American
..............................people. Whenever Bush is held accountable for anything, his re-
..............................sponse is to cite 9/11. There is only one way to erode Bush's hard
..............................core base, and that is by attacking the 9/11 myth. Destroy the 9/11
..............................myth, and the September criminals may be called to account. De-
..............................stroy the 9/11 myth, and Bush will be neutralized. Peace-loving gov-
..............................ernments and institutions around the world must address this task,
..............................with a campaign of denunciation, exposure, and political education
..............................on the truth about 9/11 and the nature of terrorism. One vehicle for
..............................this would be an Independent International Truth Commission on
..............................9/11, modeled on the Russell-Sartre Tribunal for Vietnam. The con-
..............................vocation of such a truth commission for 9/11 is more urgent than
..............................ever, and should be top priority for anti-war forces well before the
..............................Congressional elections a year from now. [Written in 2005—EL]
..........And I agree with Paul Craig Roberts when he wrote a month or two ago that
.............................. Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a
..............................year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war
..............................with Iran.
..........I don't agree with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the tragically disappointing John Conyer, with Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama or John Edwards, with Adolph Giuliani or Elliot Spitzer or Larry Silverstein, and I don't agree with
..........
.............................. [i]ndividuals and media outlets that . . . include David Corn and
..............................The Nation; Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!; Chip Berlet,
..............................senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville,
..............................Massachusetts; David Barsamian of Alternative Radio; Michael
..............................Albert of Z Magazine; Alexander Cockburn; Norman Solomon;
..............................The Progressive; Mother Jones; Alternet.org; Global Exchange;
..............................PBS; South End Press; Public Research Associates; FAIR/
..............................Extra!; Counterspin; Columbia Journalism Review; Deep Dish
..............................TV; Working Assets; Molly Ivins [R.I.P.—EL]; Ms Magazine; Inter
..............................Press Service; MoveOn.org; Greg Palast; David Zupan; North-
..............................west Media Project. . .
..........And guess who else I don't agree with. Hey, you got it on the first try! I don't agree with Frank Rich.
..........In the spring semester of 1960, when I was in my second freshman semester of college, I began learning about writing, even though half the time I didn't know I was learning. And then much later, sometime in the early 1980s, in a seminar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the seminar leader happened to ask me—it was a mixed seminar, and I was there as a literary member of it—how I would define writing. He knew that I was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and I knew that any good definition of good writing would necessarily be equally applicable to both (and, I would say now, also to poetry). And what I found myself telling him, not knowing before that moment that I'd already formulated the definition, possibly over the span of a couple of decades, was this:
..........It's a literary definition, but I did tell you that this was going to be a literary essay-and, besides, all writing should be literary writing.
..........Now, as we draw ever closer to the narrow subject of Frank Rich, I would like to ask readers to consider what things I learned when, on Sunday, September 17, 2006—just a bit over a year ago—I opened up the Times and found this passage in Rich's op ed piece, "The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies":
..............................You'd think that after having been caught concocting the
....................scenario that took the nation to war in Iraq, the White House
....................would mind the facts now. But this administration understands
....................our culture all too well. This is a country where a cable news
....................network (MSNBC) offers in-depth journalism about one of its
....................anchors (Tucker Carlson) losing a prime-time dance contest
....................and where conspiracy nuts have created a cottage industry
....................of books and DVD's by arguing that hijacked jets did not
....................cause 9/11 and that the 9/11 commission was a cover-up.
....................(The fictionalied "Path to 9/11," supposedly based on the
....................commission's report, only advanced the nuts' case.) If you're
....................a White House stuck in a quagmire in an election year, what's
....................the percentage in starting to tell the truth now? It's better to
....................game the system.
..........Just for information's sake, I mention that the next paragraph of Rich's piece beings with this sentence, providing an excellent early example—there will be many, many more in Part 2 of this essay—of Rich doing the exact thing (lying) that he's simultaneously accusing others of doing: "The untruths," says he, "are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job."
..........I'll say. What I argued a year ago when I wrote about this piece is worth going back to—and I'll do that in Part 2. For now, though, let's just take care of that question—the question of what a person learns from reading this one paragraph plus a sentence of Frank Rich.
..........Another question as a way into the first one: Is Rich a writer, by our definition?
..........And it's impossible—isn't it?—for the answer to be anything other than "No." Is Rich telling the truth in a way that itself is also true?
..........No, you can't be a writer by that standard and at the same time use smear and innuendo; assert half-truths as though they were whole truths; and—at the end—twist things so as to allow yourself acquittal for doing the very thing you're condemning others for doing.
..........Let's pin this down. The smear and innuendo lie in the cheap and slummy phrases "conspiracy nuts," "cottage industry," and "the nuts' case." Now, just consider this fact: By September 2007, I know with absolute certainty (because I myself read them or had read them at or by that time) that each of these books on 9/11 had been published, were in print, and were available for anyone to read; and I know also that any single one of them would reveal to a serious and open-minded reader that research into 911 truth is hardly the domain solely of "nut cases" but is predominantly the domain of serious, principled, dedicated, broadly experienced researchers, scholars, commentators, and historians:
....................Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Freedom: How and Why America
....................was Attacked September 11, 2001. (2002)
....................Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and
....................the Anatomy of Terrorism. (2005)
....................Chossudovsky, Michel. America's "War On Terrorism. (2005)
....................Griffin, David Ray. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Dis-
....................tortions. (2005)
....................Griffin, David Ray. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About
....................the Bush Administration and 9/11. (2004)
....................Hicks, Sander. The Big Wedding. (2005)
....................Morgan, Rowland, and Ian Henshall. 9/11 Revealed. (2005)
....................Ruppert, Michael C. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the Amer-
....................ican Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. (2004)
....................Tarpley, Webster Griffin. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. (2005)
..........If Rich is writing in late 2006 and is still making cheap shots at the 9/11 truth movement with smears and half truths—"arguing that hijacked jets did not cause 9/11" is at best a peripheral and minority aspect of 9/11 thinking; by alluding only to it and in a quick and phony dance-step ignoring the central concerns of most 9/11 scholarship, Rich lies by putting a half truth in place of a whole one—if he's still doing that sort stuff in late 2006, what does a person learn about him?
..........Well, a person learns that he's 1) either a far, far greater liar even than he seems, since he's claiming not to know things he really does know; or that 2) he's a dismal mediocrity if not outright failure as a reporter, since he's failed totally to make contact with or any use of the most visible and essential of research materials relevant to his subject; or you learn that he's 3) neither a writer of principle nor a man of principle, since he's willing to slur, smear, defame, lie, and present truth as falsehood (after all, the 9/11 commission really was a coverup)—all because his owners tell him that's what he's got to do if he wants to keep his job.
..........What was that definition of writing—something about telling the truth in a way that itself is also true, I believe?
..........And here what do we have instead of someone fitting that definition? The actuality looks pretty grim. We're dealing here with the one subject—9/11 truth—that's more than just arguably the single most important matter that exists in political and cultural affairs today. Whether the free republic will become a police state within the next ten months depends on it; whether the cultural, artistic, and literary life of the nation will continue its decline into the empty and ephemeral rather than strengthening once again depends on it; whether genuine care and husbanding of the planet itself will actually occur depends on it; the lives themselves of millions, and the safety from fear, disease, penury, suffering, and starvation of millions upon millions more in countries abroad depend on it; and the historic grounding, the dignity, any part of what may still be left of human and common good in the United Sates, depends on it. All of these things and more depend on the exposure of the high crimes of 9/11 and the holding accountable of those responsible for them.
..........It seems to me one of the most, if not the most, important matter in the world today. And what do we have in Frank Rich when he looks at this matter? Well, a year ago we had 1) a dishonest, contemptuous, smearing clown who either really was totally ignorant of the truth of his subject, or 2) a person who was lying monstrously about something he did know, claiming not to know, or 3) a person who was the true and complete whore, performing anything whatsoever that his paying customer, in this case the New York Times, asked him to do—oral, anal, animal, other—and doing nothing whatsoever that that customer would not pay for, however true, serious, honorable, and important that other thing might be.
..........This is not a matter of telling the truth in a way that is also itself true.
..........Instead, this is—well, being struck speechless, let me leave the work to you. I suggest that you choose one, none, some, or all of the following:
..........This is fraud;
..........This is hypocrisy;
..........This is treason;
..........This is the aiding and abetting of monstrous criminality;
..........This is frivolity, depravity, poisonous non-seriousness;
..........This is total inconsideration for the welfare of an entire nation and its people;
..........This is conscious enmity toward an entire nation and its people;
..........This is a vivid example of the moral penury, the absence of conscience,
..........and the wholesale depravity, fraud, and deceit, of the mainstream media
..........today and of those working within it.
..........The second part of the point I take as axiomatic is very simple and I think indisputable. The Bush junta is responsible now for a six-year-long string of crimes. That it has proven itself unstoppable for that length of time is a grim gift that we owe thanks for to a corrupt, bought-off, and complicit congress that has either approved or at the very least failed to hold the junta accountable for a single one of those crimes—with the exception of one very, very, very important crime, the crime that made all the subsequent crimes possible, namely, of course, 9/11.
..........This is why I said before (and got most confusedly "criticized" for) and why I say again that only the exposure of the truth about 9/11, followed by appropriate measures holding accountable those responsible for the crimes of 9/11 or for enabling those crimes (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Air Force general Richard Myers, just for three) or abetting them (Giuliani, Rice, and Powell, just for three more).
..........One of the significant things about this point—that 9/11 truth alone can slow the junta, make it accountable for its crimes, or end it—is that six years is long enough to prove that no established branch of government or of law inside the United States is going to expose this truth or begin prosecutions because of it. Therefore? Therefore, the job must be done—and can be done only—by the nation's people.
..........The central facts of the case in the heinous and witheringly cold-blooded 9/11 crimes, in spite of certain remaining unknowns, are evident, transparent, and eminently provable. Any thinking, reading, intelligent, and observant person can discover this inexpressibly important fact simply by taking the time and mustering the interest to familiarize him- or herself with even some of the essential scholarly work that has been done on the history, the truth, and the facts of 9/11.
..........The situation is this: Nothing less than a third of the population of the U.S. doubts the "official" story about 9/11 and either suspects or is convinced that 9/11 was an "inside job." Even though a person wishes it were two-thirds instead of one, this number is momentous and significant.
..........Let's hypothesize for a moment how we might reasonably classify the American population into the smallest number of groups possible without there being overlap among them. This is a good and useful exercise in rhetoric, thought, and logic of the kind once included during fall semesters in English 101 classrooms all over the land but is now as likely to go untouched. I'm going to propose, given our interest here and now, that all Americans can be distinguished as belonging to one of three groups, and that these groups will be distinct from one another yet will leave no one out. Hence:
..............................1) Thinking and observant Americans.
..............................2) Blind Americans, those for whom the media determine most
..............................if not all "reality" (cf. A Nation Gone Blind)
..............................3) Bought, guilty, complicit Americans, those who continue to
..............................deny and suppress 9/11 truth while at the same time knowing
..............................that truth.
..........Anyone who went through a good English 101 course knows that these groups need not be and very likely will not be equal or anywhere near equal in the number of their members. And that's true here. The likelihood is that Group 2 will be the largest, since the polls telling us that one-third of Americans embrace or lean toward 9/11 truth suggest simultaneously that two-thirds don't. It follows that that two thirds must be the less-informed, the less-observant, the less-inquisitive two thirds. I'm going to call them "blind."
..........And so where does this leave us? Two thirds of Americans—roughly—are blind. One third of Americans—roughly—is thinking, observant, and inquisitive. This means that only the leftovers fill up Group 3, making it clearly, patently, and obviously the smallest group of the three. And yet, though the smallest, it is also—as things stand now—the most powerful.
..........It's the most powerful, and it's also the group that could be renamed the group of liars, the group of deceivers, the group of falsifiers and repressors, the group of those who are complicit in the crimes of 9/11 by merit of hiding the truth of those crimes, the group of those who are treasonous by merit of covering up known crimes of treason, and, finally, they could be renamed the group of explicit enemies against the entirety of Group one, while simultaneously being implicit enemies of all of Group two (even though those in Group two don't know that, since they don't understand that those in Group 3 are liars but believe them to be truth-tellers).
..........And exactly who is in the criminal Group 3? Well, Amy Goodman is in it, Frank Rich is in it, Nancy Pelosi is in it, Harry Reid is in it, John Conyers is in it, all the media people I mentioned before as choosing to be liars are in it, Adolph Giuliani is in it, Elliot Spitzer is in it and Larry Silverstein is in it—and so on. See also here.
..........In short, members of the Bush administration, members of the houses of congress, and the huge numbers of people who work in the mainstream media—these are the members of Group 3. What do you suppose their actual numbers come to? How many of them do you suppose there really are? Well, there are one hundred in the Senate and 433 in the House for a total of 533. What shall we say for the number of people constituting the Bush administration, including cabinet members, close advisors, ambassadors, and so on? How about five hundred, for a running total now of 1,033. And how many work in the mainstream media, print, video, and radio—including NPR, Pacifica, and the like? Let's estimate that those working in or near the editorial side of the media come to something like 25,000, including everybody from the tiniest little radio stations in the tiniest little towns, every reporter in every paper, every advisor in every station, every announcer, every editor, every columnist. If we're at all close, we've got a total now for the membership of Group 3 that comes to 26,033.
..........Now we've got to add every corporate owner of the media, the membership of every corporate board that controls the media, and every head of and influential staff in pertinent agencies from, say, the FCC on through the Motion Picture Association of America.
..........Let's say there are a thousand people—-a well-dressed yet reptilian in-group of schmoozers and their like-minded "friends" who make up among themselves the membership of all the most important corporate boards in America. That means we're up to 27,033. Let's triple—no, let's quadruple—the total just to be sure we've got everyone, including high elements of the military and of the numerous intelligence agencies. Quadrupling gives us a grand total of 108,132.
..........Now. Those hundred-thousand people—they're our enemies. They're the obvious enemies of Group 1 and, as I suggested, the enemies also of Group 2, though Group 2 doesn't know it.
..........What do you think? Let's say there are 300,000,000 people in the U.S. We know already that 100,000,000 of them are in Group 1 and either know, suspect, or lean toward 9/11 Truth. Even leaving Group 2 out of the argument for the moment, that suggests that 100,000,000 people are being held hostage by 108,132!
..........I, for one, hate being ruled by gangs. I, for one, hate being ruled by thuggery. I, for one, hate being ruled by deceit, deception, cover-up, lies, thievery, criminality, treason, and fraud. I, for one, hate the "left gatekeepers," some of whom you can see as listed here by the great Barrie Zwicker in his equally great book, Towers of Deception.
..........I, for one, agree with Zwicker when he writes (on pp. 238-239 of Towers of Deception) that
..............................Revealing the fraud of 9/11 in my opinion is the single most important
..............................task faced by civilization today. That it was dared is the supreme
..............................Achilles heel of the Fourth Reich. If enough people could be awakened
..............................to the enormity of the crime, and who its perpetrators are, they
..............................become a politically-relevant constituency. Then the possibility of
..............................a cleansing transformation would emerge. [emphasis added] Every
..............................worthwhile initiative you can name, be it environmental, social, pol-
..............................itical or economic, would benefit from politically-relevant exposure
..............................of the Great Deception.
..........I agree also with Webster Tarpley when he writes the following:
........................................But as long as Bush can keep his base of 30-35% of the US
..............................population, he can wage war in Iraq indefinitely, and possibly widen
..............................that war to Syria and Iran. Bush's hold on his base is due largely
..............................to the power of the 9/11 myth over certain parts of the American
..............................people. Whenever Bush is held accountable for anything, his re-
..............................sponse is to cite 9/11. There is only one way to erode Bush's hard
..............................core base, and that is by attacking the 9/11 myth. Destroy the 9/11
..............................myth, and the September criminals may be called to account. De-
..............................stroy the 9/11 myth, and Bush will be neutralized. Peace-loving gov-
..............................ernments and institutions around the world must address this task,
..............................with a campaign of denunciation, exposure, and political education
..............................on the truth about 9/11 and the nature of terrorism. One vehicle for
..............................this would be an Independent International Truth Commission on
..............................9/11, modeled on the Russell-Sartre Tribunal for Vietnam. The con-
..............................vocation of such a truth commission for 9/11 is more urgent than
..............................ever, and should be top priority for anti-war forces well before the
..............................Congressional elections a year from now. [Written in 2005—EL]
..........And I agree with Paul Craig Roberts when he wrote a month or two ago that
.............................. Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a
..............................year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war
..............................with Iran.
..........I don't agree with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the tragically disappointing John Conyer, with Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama or John Edwards, with Adolph Giuliani or Elliot Spitzer or Larry Silverstein, and I don't agree with
..........
.............................. [i]ndividuals and media outlets that . . . include David Corn and
..............................The Nation; Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!; Chip Berlet,
..............................senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville,
..............................Massachusetts; David Barsamian of Alternative Radio; Michael
..............................Albert of Z Magazine; Alexander Cockburn; Norman Solomon;
..............................The Progressive; Mother Jones; Alternet.org; Global Exchange;
..............................PBS; South End Press; Public Research Associates; FAIR/
..............................Extra!; Counterspin; Columbia Journalism Review; Deep Dish
..............................TV; Working Assets; Molly Ivins [R.I.P.—EL]; Ms Magazine; Inter
..............................Press Service; MoveOn.org; Greg Palast; David Zupan; North-
..............................west Media Project. . .
..........And guess who else I don't agree with. Hey, you got it on the first try! I don't agree with Frank Rich.
..........In the spring semester of 1960, when I was in my second freshman semester of college, I began learning about writing, even though half the time I didn't know I was learning. And then much later, sometime in the early 1980s, in a seminar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the seminar leader happened to ask me—it was a mixed seminar, and I was there as a literary member of it—how I would define writing. He knew that I was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and I knew that any good definition of good writing would necessarily be equally applicable to both (and, I would say now, also to poetry). And what I found myself telling him, not knowing before that moment that I'd already formulated the definition, possibly over the span of a couple of decades, was this:
Writing is telling the truth in a way that itself is also true.
..........It's a literary definition, but I did tell you that this was going to be a literary essay-and, besides, all writing should be literary writing.
..........Now, as we draw ever closer to the narrow subject of Frank Rich, I would like to ask readers to consider what things I learned when, on Sunday, September 17, 2006—just a bit over a year ago—I opened up the Times and found this passage in Rich's op ed piece, "The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies":
..............................You'd think that after having been caught concocting the
....................scenario that took the nation to war in Iraq, the White House
....................would mind the facts now. But this administration understands
....................our culture all too well. This is a country where a cable news
....................network (MSNBC) offers in-depth journalism about one of its
....................anchors (Tucker Carlson) losing a prime-time dance contest
....................and where conspiracy nuts have created a cottage industry
....................of books and DVD's by arguing that hijacked jets did not
....................cause 9/11 and that the 9/11 commission was a cover-up.
....................(The fictionalied "Path to 9/11," supposedly based on the
....................commission's report, only advanced the nuts' case.) If you're
....................a White House stuck in a quagmire in an election year, what's
....................the percentage in starting to tell the truth now? It's better to
....................game the system.
..........Just for information's sake, I mention that the next paragraph of Rich's piece beings with this sentence, providing an excellent early example—there will be many, many more in Part 2 of this essay—of Rich doing the exact thing (lying) that he's simultaneously accusing others of doing: "The untruths," says he, "are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job."
..........I'll say. What I argued a year ago when I wrote about this piece is worth going back to—and I'll do that in Part 2. For now, though, let's just take care of that question—the question of what a person learns from reading this one paragraph plus a sentence of Frank Rich.
..........Another question as a way into the first one: Is Rich a writer, by our definition?
..........And it's impossible—isn't it?—for the answer to be anything other than "No." Is Rich telling the truth in a way that itself is also true?
..........No, you can't be a writer by that standard and at the same time use smear and innuendo; assert half-truths as though they were whole truths; and—at the end—twist things so as to allow yourself acquittal for doing the very thing you're condemning others for doing.
..........Let's pin this down. The smear and innuendo lie in the cheap and slummy phrases "conspiracy nuts," "cottage industry," and "the nuts' case." Now, just consider this fact: By September 2007, I know with absolute certainty (because I myself read them or had read them at or by that time) that each of these books on 9/11 had been published, were in print, and were available for anyone to read; and I know also that any single one of them would reveal to a serious and open-minded reader that research into 911 truth is hardly the domain solely of "nut cases" but is predominantly the domain of serious, principled, dedicated, broadly experienced researchers, scholars, commentators, and historians:
....................Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Freedom: How and Why America
....................was Attacked September 11, 2001. (2002)
....................Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and
....................the Anatomy of Terrorism. (2005)
....................Chossudovsky, Michel. America's "War On Terrorism. (2005)
....................Griffin, David Ray. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Dis-
....................tortions. (2005)
....................Griffin, David Ray. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About
....................the Bush Administration and 9/11. (2004)
....................Hicks, Sander. The Big Wedding. (2005)
....................Morgan, Rowland, and Ian Henshall. 9/11 Revealed. (2005)
....................Ruppert, Michael C. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the Amer-
....................ican Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. (2004)
....................Tarpley, Webster Griffin. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. (2005)
..........If Rich is writing in late 2006 and is still making cheap shots at the 9/11 truth movement with smears and half truths—"arguing that hijacked jets did not cause 9/11" is at best a peripheral and minority aspect of 9/11 thinking; by alluding only to it and in a quick and phony dance-step ignoring the central concerns of most 9/11 scholarship, Rich lies by putting a half truth in place of a whole one—if he's still doing that sort stuff in late 2006, what does a person learn about him?
..........Well, a person learns that he's 1) either a far, far greater liar even than he seems, since he's claiming not to know things he really does know; or that 2) he's a dismal mediocrity if not outright failure as a reporter, since he's failed totally to make contact with or any use of the most visible and essential of research materials relevant to his subject; or you learn that he's 3) neither a writer of principle nor a man of principle, since he's willing to slur, smear, defame, lie, and present truth as falsehood (after all, the 9/11 commission really was a coverup)—all because his owners tell him that's what he's got to do if he wants to keep his job.
..........What was that definition of writing—something about telling the truth in a way that itself is also true, I believe?
..........And here what do we have instead of someone fitting that definition? The actuality looks pretty grim. We're dealing here with the one subject—9/11 truth—that's more than just arguably the single most important matter that exists in political and cultural affairs today. Whether the free republic will become a police state within the next ten months depends on it; whether the cultural, artistic, and literary life of the nation will continue its decline into the empty and ephemeral rather than strengthening once again depends on it; whether genuine care and husbanding of the planet itself will actually occur depends on it; the lives themselves of millions, and the safety from fear, disease, penury, suffering, and starvation of millions upon millions more in countries abroad depend on it; and the historic grounding, the dignity, any part of what may still be left of human and common good in the United Sates, depends on it. All of these things and more depend on the exposure of the high crimes of 9/11 and the holding accountable of those responsible for them.
..........It seems to me one of the most, if not the most, important matter in the world today. And what do we have in Frank Rich when he looks at this matter? Well, a year ago we had 1) a dishonest, contemptuous, smearing clown who either really was totally ignorant of the truth of his subject, or 2) a person who was lying monstrously about something he did know, claiming not to know, or 3) a person who was the true and complete whore, performing anything whatsoever that his paying customer, in this case the New York Times, asked him to do—oral, anal, animal, other—and doing nothing whatsoever that that customer would not pay for, however true, serious, honorable, and important that other thing might be.
..........This is not a matter of telling the truth in a way that is also itself true.
..........Instead, this is—well, being struck speechless, let me leave the work to you. I suggest that you choose one, none, some, or all of the following:
..........This is fraud;
..........This is hypocrisy;
..........This is treason;
..........This is the aiding and abetting of monstrous criminality;
..........This is frivolity, depravity, poisonous non-seriousness;
..........This is total inconsideration for the welfare of an entire nation and its people;
..........This is conscious enmity toward an entire nation and its people;
..........This is a vivid example of the moral penury, the absence of conscience,
..........and the wholesale depravity, fraud, and deceit, of the mainstream media
..........today and of those working within it.
·
..........And so we pause. For a year or so, since September of 2006, I've followed Rich's pieces on the Op Ed page in the Sunday Times. In Part Two of this piece—Part Two of this literary essay—I'll take up some of what I've found there over that time.
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—October 11, 2007
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—October 11, 2007
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 13, Part 2
Number 13, Part 2
(NEW SERIES—2007)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
(OR READ THE PIECE ON ATLANTIC FREE PRESS)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
(OR READ THE PIECE ON ATLANTIC FREE PRESS)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
THE
PERNICIOUS HYPOCRISY
OF FRANK RICH
OF THE
NEW YORK TIMES
Part Two
THE
PERNICIOUS HYPOCRISY
OF FRANK RICH
OF THE
NEW YORK TIMES
Part Two
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
................................................................................The corporate media today have become, collectively, less
................................................................................a vehicle of information than of mind control.
....................................................................................................—Peter Dale Scott The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire,
....................................................................................................and the Future of America (2007), p. 249
................................................................................Today the US media serves as propaganda ministry for the
................................................................................government's wars and police state.
....................................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "Conservatism Isn't What It Used To Be"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 7, 2007)
................................................................................ We have rendered the nation deaf and dumb. We no longer
................................................................................have the capacity for empathy.
....................................................................................................—Chris Hedges, "Iran, the Next Quagmire"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 4, 2007)
................................................................................Remedy: In order to turn this trend around, the people of the
................................................................................US must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian traits of empathy
................................................................................and engagement.
....................................................................................................—Phil Rockstrohe, "Q and A for the People of a Forsaken Republic"
....................................................................................................(October 2, 2007)
................................................................................Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile,
................................................................................criminal, or delusional?
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen, "Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 3
....................................................................................................(July 29, 2007)
................................................................................a vehicle of information than of mind control.
....................................................................................................—Peter Dale Scott The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire,
....................................................................................................and the Future of America (2007), p. 249
................................................................................Today the US media serves as propaganda ministry for the
................................................................................government's wars and police state.
....................................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "Conservatism Isn't What It Used To Be"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 7, 2007)
................................................................................ We have rendered the nation deaf and dumb. We no longer
................................................................................have the capacity for empathy.
....................................................................................................—Chris Hedges, "Iran, the Next Quagmire"
....................................................................................................(Sept. 4, 2007)
................................................................................Remedy: In order to turn this trend around, the people of the
................................................................................US must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian traits of empathy
................................................................................and engagement.
....................................................................................................—Phil Rockstrohe, "Q and A for the People of a Forsaken Republic"
....................................................................................................(October 2, 2007)
................................................................................Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile,
................................................................................criminal, or delusional?
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen, "Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 3
....................................................................................................(July 29, 2007)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
1
..........
....................After I began writing pieces attacking what Barrie Zwicker calls the "left gatekeepers," I began seeing a pattern that I couldn't attribute to anything other than some kind of self-destructive and yet also self-imposed blindness to certain very important aspects of plain reality—the plain reality, specifically, of 9/11 and the events surrounding it.
..........How and why would a person purposely become a part of an enormous conspiracy to deny, hide, and suppress the truth of what actually happened that day, along with the truth of why it happened? Why would anyone, especially a left-leaning person, actually choose to join a conspiracy that would and could function only in the service of the neoconservative criminals and traitors, both those visible and those living in deep shadow, who over the past six years have been going about the business of destroying both the republic and the Constitution and of establishing by force a hegemonic control over not only the Middle East but the world?
..........Why would a liberal person do such a thing? Why would such a person choose to take sides with the neocons? And how could they?
..........Who are some of those covering up for the traitor-guys? Zwicker lists a good sampling—of both people and institutions—in his powerful and indispensibly important 2006 book, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11.
.........."A surprisingly large number of Left media outlets," he says (pp. 218-219), "—most of them, in fact—have adopted the same stance on 9/11 as Chomsky's: refuse to investigate 9/11, and discourage or ridicule those who do." Zwicker adds that most of the gatekeepers "wind up using the familiar 'wacky conspiracy theorists' putdown to describe others on the Left who want to discuss the evidence of an inside job on 9/11."
..........And he gives a list of such "putdown" people, groups, and outlets:
....................Individuals and media outlets that have exhibited this stay-away-from-9/11
....................stance, entirely or in large part, for more than four years now include David
....................Corn and The Nation; Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!; Chip Berlet,
....................senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachu-
....................setts; David Barsamian of Alternative Radio; Michael Albert of Z Magazine;
....................Alexander Cockburn; Norman Solomon; The Progressive; Mother Jones;
....................Alternet.org; Global Exchange; PBS; South End Press; Public Research
....................Associates; FAIR/ Extra!; Counterspin; Columbia Journalism Review;
....................Deep Dish TV; Working Assets; Molly Ivins; Ms Magazine; Inter Press
....................Service; MoveOn.org; Greg-Palast: David Zupan; Northwest Media Project. . .
..........On the subject of that list, Zwicker writes that "The almost total uniformity within Left media in sync with the White House and Right media [on the subject of 9/11] is more than puzzling"—and the reason it's "puzzling" is that the left media, on other issues, "pursue questions of malfeasance on the part of the power elites" and continue doing the job that's traditionally—and indispensably—the job of a free liberal press.
..........And so why the closed ranks and the great unity of silence on the lone and single subject of 9/11 truth? People can reasonably differ in opinion and view, Zwicker grants, then adds: "But it is a startling anomaly for so many organs and leaders of the conscious Left to be seemingly unconscious regarding 9/11."
..........The passage is worth quoting further:
....................More than a few on the Left share the opinion of progressive film maker
....................Roy Harvey that "the greatest single obstacle to the spread of 9/11 Truth
....................is the Left media." To my mind, the relationship of Chomsky and the Left
....................Gatekeepers on 9/11 is analogous to the relationship of the White House
....................and the 9/11 Commission. Both relationships are so tight as to invite
....................close scrutiny. Elementary pattern recognition reveals a common agenda
....................among these otherwise well-informed, intelligent, investigative critics of
....................corporate greed, the power elite and US hegemony. The agenda, com-
....................pletely atypical of their approach generally, is to vigorously reject inves-
....................tigation into 9/11. This is prima facie. One example, that of perhaps
....................Chomsky's best known protégé and amplifier, David Barsamian, is typ-
....................ical of 9/11 blindness on the Left.
..........What does or can a person conclude? What does it mean, this 9/11 gate-keeper-blindness "on the Left," this refusal to open up the one thing that's now of the greatest importance imaginable?
..........If and as the nation goes fascist; if and as the Iraq war proves to have no end—no end ever having been intended; if and as Iran goes under U.S. attack and the middle east falls into chaos; if and as such things as these take place only because impeachment was made impossible, impeachment having been made impossible only because of the stonewalling from the left that buried 9/11 truth and covered up the one weapon that the people really could have and could use against the junta—then, when all of that has happened, whose fault will it be?
..........I ask again, Whose fault will it be? Whose fault is it so far that the junta hasn't been braked? And why is it their fault? Why has the "left" media behaved in a way so patently against the nation's best interest?
....................After I began writing pieces attacking what Barrie Zwicker calls the "left gatekeepers," I began seeing a pattern that I couldn't attribute to anything other than some kind of self-destructive and yet also self-imposed blindness to certain very important aspects of plain reality—the plain reality, specifically, of 9/11 and the events surrounding it.
..........How and why would a person purposely become a part of an enormous conspiracy to deny, hide, and suppress the truth of what actually happened that day, along with the truth of why it happened? Why would anyone, especially a left-leaning person, actually choose to join a conspiracy that would and could function only in the service of the neoconservative criminals and traitors, both those visible and those living in deep shadow, who over the past six years have been going about the business of destroying both the republic and the Constitution and of establishing by force a hegemonic control over not only the Middle East but the world?
..........Why would a liberal person do such a thing? Why would such a person choose to take sides with the neocons? And how could they?
..........Who are some of those covering up for the traitor-guys? Zwicker lists a good sampling—of both people and institutions—in his powerful and indispensibly important 2006 book, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11.
.........."A surprisingly large number of Left media outlets," he says (pp. 218-219), "—most of them, in fact—have adopted the same stance on 9/11 as Chomsky's: refuse to investigate 9/11, and discourage or ridicule those who do." Zwicker adds that most of the gatekeepers "wind up using the familiar 'wacky conspiracy theorists' putdown to describe others on the Left who want to discuss the evidence of an inside job on 9/11."
..........And he gives a list of such "putdown" people, groups, and outlets:
....................Individuals and media outlets that have exhibited this stay-away-from-9/11
....................stance, entirely or in large part, for more than four years now include David
....................Corn and The Nation; Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!; Chip Berlet,
....................senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachu-
....................setts; David Barsamian of Alternative Radio; Michael Albert of Z Magazine;
....................Alexander Cockburn; Norman Solomon; The Progressive; Mother Jones;
....................Alternet.org; Global Exchange; PBS; South End Press; Public Research
....................Associates; FAIR/ Extra!; Counterspin; Columbia Journalism Review;
....................Deep Dish TV; Working Assets; Molly Ivins; Ms Magazine; Inter Press
....................Service; MoveOn.org; Greg-Palast: David Zupan; Northwest Media Project. . .
..........On the subject of that list, Zwicker writes that "The almost total uniformity within Left media in sync with the White House and Right media [on the subject of 9/11] is more than puzzling"—and the reason it's "puzzling" is that the left media, on other issues, "pursue questions of malfeasance on the part of the power elites" and continue doing the job that's traditionally—and indispensably—the job of a free liberal press.
..........And so why the closed ranks and the great unity of silence on the lone and single subject of 9/11 truth? People can reasonably differ in opinion and view, Zwicker grants, then adds: "But it is a startling anomaly for so many organs and leaders of the conscious Left to be seemingly unconscious regarding 9/11."
..........The passage is worth quoting further:
....................More than a few on the Left share the opinion of progressive film maker
....................Roy Harvey that "the greatest single obstacle to the spread of 9/11 Truth
....................is the Left media." To my mind, the relationship of Chomsky and the Left
....................Gatekeepers on 9/11 is analogous to the relationship of the White House
....................and the 9/11 Commission. Both relationships are so tight as to invite
....................close scrutiny. Elementary pattern recognition reveals a common agenda
....................among these otherwise well-informed, intelligent, investigative critics of
....................corporate greed, the power elite and US hegemony. The agenda, com-
....................pletely atypical of their approach generally, is to vigorously reject inves-
....................tigation into 9/11. This is prima facie. One example, that of perhaps
....................Chomsky's best known protégé and amplifier, David Barsamian, is typ-
....................ical of 9/11 blindness on the Left.
..........What does or can a person conclude? What does it mean, this 9/11 gate-keeper-blindness "on the Left," this refusal to open up the one thing that's now of the greatest importance imaginable?
..........If and as the nation goes fascist; if and as the Iraq war proves to have no end—no end ever having been intended; if and as Iran goes under U.S. attack and the middle east falls into chaos; if and as such things as these take place only because impeachment was made impossible, impeachment having been made impossible only because of the stonewalling from the left that buried 9/11 truth and covered up the one weapon that the people really could have and could use against the junta—then, when all of that has happened, whose fault will it be?
..........I ask again, Whose fault will it be? Whose fault is it so far that the junta hasn't been braked? And why is it their fault? Why has the "left" media behaved in a way so patently against the nation's best interest?
2
..........
....................I began feeling the intensity of this self-imposed blindness on the part of left-leaners only when I began writing about Amy Goodman. Nothing of the sort happened when I wrote about the trunks-full of deceptions in the New York Times of April 2, 2007, ("Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth" [April 2007]), and nothing like it happened when I wrote "Ariana Huffington Tells the Truth (and Doesn't Even Know It" [December 2006]) or when I wrote about Matthew Rothschild deserving an "F" and there being no grade low enough for Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch ("U.S.A—Land of Liars" [January 2007]).
..........It started happening only with "Amy Goodman: A Mind Prostituted" (April 2007), and it went on with "Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman?" (April 2007), a title taken from the piercing 2006 essay on Goodman by Carolyn Baker, "The Empress Has No Clothes: Amy Goodman's Reality Blackout." And it continued with "What Would It Be Like To Be Amy Goodman?" (September 2007).
..........So Rothschild sparked nothing, Cockburn sparked nothing, as neither did Ariana Huffington or the despicable Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker or Jacob Weisberg when in September 2006 he wrote his genuinely absurd "Five Years Free: Why Haven't We Been Attacked Again?" in Slate, a dim-witted non-think piece trounced by me as hard as I could trounce in "Our Enemies, the Left Gatekeepers." "What Can This Man Be Thinking?" That was my response after reading this bit of utter inanity in the Slate piece:
....................As the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, perhaps the most sur-
....................prising result is that American life has not changed very much at all. We
....................worry more about terrorism and have to allow more time to negotiate air-
....................port security. But amazingly, al-Qaida hasn't claimed a single additional
....................victim inside the United States. This fact is all the more remarkable when
....................you consider the special challenges America faces in preventing terror-
....................ism: thousands of miles of porous border; an open, mobile society; and
....................easy access to firearms.
..........Since I was perfectly aghast at such nonsense, I wrote, back then in December 2006,
....................After all, what surprise can there conceivably be in another 9/11 not hav-
....................ing taken place in five years? Since the Bushiscti themselves were the
....................perpetrators of 9/11, isn't it self-explanatory? The Bushiscti pulled off
....................their inside job, got away with it, and got what they wanted from it—
....................namely carte-blanche war-making powers from "congress," a wide open-
....................ing of the purse-strings for said war-making, an instantly-created imagin-
....................ary enemy to make war against, and, hardly least, the best opportunity
....................conceivable to begin their program of the crushing, or, if you wish, the
....................stripping away, of Constitutional liberties, starting with the so-called
....................Patriot Act and now—those famous five years later—having legalized
....................torture, gotten rid of habeas corpus, gutted the Insurrection Act, and
....................gotten "legislators" to ante up $38 million for spiffing up concentration
....................camps inside the U.S.—an event reported on this way by the Hono-
....................lulu Advertiser: "Notorious internment camps where Japanese-Ameri-
....................cans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II will be pre-
....................served as stark reminders of how the United States turned on some
....................of its citizens in a time of fear."
..........I could hardly believe my eyes or ears then and I can hardly believe them now. revisiting the scene. I asked:
....................Why is Jacob Weisberg so set upon being a self-blinded non-seer?
....................Why Frank Rich? Why Amy Goodman? Why David Corn? Why
....................Nicholas Lemann? What do they hope to gain? Do they think the
....................Bushiscti will be nice, or good, to them in return for their craven
....................fidelity when the rest of the nation goes to its ruin, falls into pen-
....................ury and need and want, or goes to the camps that are being pre-
....................pared or are prepared already for those who were faithless? Do the
....................gatekeepers actually trust in the Bushiscti and in the Cheneyiscti;
....................do they actually believe that, in payment for their complicity now
....................they'll be paid back later in the coin of favor? Could the gatekeepers
....................conceivably be that depraved; could the gatekeepers conceivably
....................be that deceived?
....................What else could explain it? How can anything explain it?
..........I wrote and nobody responded, silence ruled supreme, I heard nothing, knew nothing, could tell nothing. Of course, this could all have been due simply to my having had no readers. But the minute I took on Amy Goodman as a gatekeeper, letters from highly incensed readers arrived, bearing demands to be dropped from my list.
..........A typical angry one, from last May, went like this:
....................While I am [a signer] . . . of the 9/11 truth statement and I routinely
....................publish articles exploring 9/11 truth, your attack of Amy Goodman
....................and the statements you make here in this email about liberals and
....................progressives in general are toxic and destructive, and clearly des-
....................perate.
....................I still believe that the 9/11 commission was a coverup and [I?] even
....................commissioned polling that showed that the majority of Democrats
....................and over 40% of the public believe that the investigation was inad-
....................equate. But you are misguided. Please remove me from your mail-
....................ing list. NOW!! And don't respond to this email either. I will label as
....................spam any further email I receive from you.
..........The piece immediately in question was "The Traitors In Our House," which I'd turned over to two guest writers—though the piece before that one ("Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman") may have offended the writer equally.
..........But what's most interesting to me is what exactly it really was that has made the writer so angry. She or he referred not just to the articles about Amy Goodman but also to the May 2007 email that I'd sent out to my list along with "The Traitors In Our House." Here's that email:
....................Dear Readers of A Nation Gone Blind, Other Recipients, Writers, Thinkers,
....................Patriots, and Friends:
....................I can do no more than trust and hope that everyone really does understand
....................the reason for this series of pieces about Amy Goodman, or pieces largely
....................about her. The reason isn't to be unfair to Amy Goodman. The reason is to
....................analyze her work and then, if necessary and appropriate, to condemn cer-
....................tain aspects of her performance as a journalist. I've chosen to focus on
....................Goodman (although in truth she's hardly alone on the little stage of this web
....................site) partly because she's so clearly associated with the left-leaning and
...................."progressive," partly because she's so well known, partly because she's so
....................well trusted, partly because she's so well loved (by many), partly because
....................she's recently turned to writing instead of just radio—and partly because
....................she is so quintessentially typical of numerous other erstwhile progressive
....................or left-leaning American journalists and commentators who—known or
....................unbeknownst to themselves—have metamorphosed since 9/11 into the
....................greatest and most dangerous liars in the entire land outside of politicians
....................themselves or figures in the true mass media, like, say, executives for
....................Fox Films or corporate purveyors of pop music.
....................Harsh to say, perhaps, but it's the result of close examination, and I
....................believe it's true. Frank Rich, Nicholas Lemann, Matthew Rothschild,
....................Ariana Huffington, Jacob Weisberg, et al—the list is long, demoralizing,
....................and suggestive of a grave and extreme danger—a danger given sinister
....................but truthful implication by Paul Craig Roberts in his recent words, "Nor-
....................mally, this is called dictatorship." (See "The State or the People," April
....................2007)
....................In fact, Amy Goodman, Frank Rich, and all the others like them are
....................aiders and abettors in the bringing about of dictatorship to the United
....................States. This is so because they are all liars by omission—that is, by re-
....................fusing to acknowledge, credit, stand behind, or publish the truth about
....................9/11, they effectually both aid and permit the continuation of the guilty
....................and as yet unaccountable Bush administration's attack not only on the
....................Iraqi and Afghan people but also on the American people, in the last
....................case through gutting of the Constitution and clear and evident preparing
....................for the imposition of martial law and a police state.
....................[material about my guest authors deleted]
....................As for the actual situation: You may not agree, but it looks to me abso-
....................lutely clear that the criminals are on the loose; are in fact holding the
....................reins of government; are as yet beyond the reach of law or accountabil-
....................ity; and can be reined in and made accountable only through the just
....................and proper prosecution of those—that is, themselves—who are respon-
....................sible for the extraordinary crimes of 9/11.
....................Eric Larsen
..........Now, I wonder how many readers would agree that what I say here about Amy Goodman and "liberals and progressives in general" is really toxic and destructive," let alone "desperate." Granting that it was evidently toxic indeed to the angry letter—writer, why was it so toxic? Before getting at the answer to that question, though, let me give another example.
..........This is something more recent, just a week or two ago. I'd seen an essay attacking the Bush junta for its illegal war policies and calling for impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Since I admired it well enough and shared its views, I wrote the author:
....................10/1/2007
....................Hello, X. X.,
....................I saw your [unnamed] piece and think it's inestimably strong
....................and good and thorough and powerful. Thank you for it. I only,
....................only wish that more would come your way and bring about the
....................necessary impeachment you urge. Why is there such mad re-
....................sistance?
....................I'm working in similar veins, though usually from a more "liter-
....................ary" approach, but trying to expose hypocrisy in the press and
....................media, doing it in my own small ways. Also have a book out,
...................."A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and
....................Deceit." I'm afraid the co-opted media have been instructed or
....................have learned to ignore books of its kind, since notice has
....................been nil.
....................But may I put you on my list of people to alert when new
....................pieces go up on my site? Here's the most recent—today
....................—letter I've sent out. Just let me know if you want off. And
....................may your work prosper and harvest peace and good. The
....................times are bad.
....................Yours, Eric Larsen
..........To my own small horror, here is what I got back:
....................10/07/07
....................Mr. Larsen,
....................Please forgive me for being so tardy in answering your kind
....................email of Oct. 1—and now here is another.
....................I appreciate and applaud your stance on these interlocking
....................issues, and urge you to continue daylighting the one about
....................which you are far better informed than I am: the facts of 9/11.
....................Let me implore you, however, to cease the attacks on those
....................who fail to match your passion: the Amy Goodmans of the
....................world and, as you know, there are a lot of doubters on the
....................left. (Cf. Alexander Cockburn.) Internecine invective serves no
....................one but the True Believers, those who, tragically, have fallen
....................under the spell of the Bush intrigue.
....................We are all fighting the same war: the hideous presidency we
....................endure. There are many battlefields, and none is demonstrably
....................the only true and correct one. Yes, arguments can be made
....................to rebut that statement, but those who make them seem to
....................me more interested in being RIGHT than in a successful end-
....................ing of the nightmare.
....................Please do not send me any more criticisms of people I see
....................as effective antagonists to the Bush regime.
..........Am I alone in the world in thinking that the arguments in this letter and in the one preceding it are the sheerest—well, let me warble out "malarkey" in order to prevent myself from soiling the reader's screen with a truly vile or at the very least scatological term—? What are these letters and others like them saying? I might ask the second writer—I in fact did ask, in a follow-up letter, one that resulted in stony silence only—how he can conceivably see left-progressives like Goodman or Weisberg—or like "Frank Rich, Nicholas Lemann, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Jacob Weisberg, et al"—as being "effective antagonists to the Bush regime"? In what way is any of them being "effective"? In what way is any of them being "effective" in altering, ending, or ameliorating the course of the inhuman and wasteful wars in Iraq or Afghanistan? in helping diminish the threat of even wider wars through attack, perhaps nuclear, on Iran? in—above all—opposing a cowardly, complicit, and petrified congress in order actually to help bring about the impeachment of the Bush-Cheney junta, a Constitutional action without which we're doomed, at the very best, to a repetition of Bush-Cheney "policy," including increasing domestic lockdown, for at least another eight years no matter which "party" may sit in the White House or hold majority control of congress?
..........The "left-progressive" media is talking about such things, I'll immediately agree, but so help me god I can find no way under the stars or the sun or the heavens that they could rightly be declared as "effective" in opposition to the junta or its ruinous, rapacious, and murderous policies. Well, maybe they are "effective antagonists," as the writer said. But "antagonists," I would add, in the sense of flies on a cow's hide in summer—an irritation to be brushed away with a sweep of the tail.
....................I began feeling the intensity of this self-imposed blindness on the part of left-leaners only when I began writing about Amy Goodman. Nothing of the sort happened when I wrote about the trunks-full of deceptions in the New York Times of April 2, 2007, ("Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth" [April 2007]), and nothing like it happened when I wrote "Ariana Huffington Tells the Truth (and Doesn't Even Know It" [December 2006]) or when I wrote about Matthew Rothschild deserving an "F" and there being no grade low enough for Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch ("U.S.A—Land of Liars" [January 2007]).
..........It started happening only with "Amy Goodman: A Mind Prostituted" (April 2007), and it went on with "Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman?" (April 2007), a title taken from the piercing 2006 essay on Goodman by Carolyn Baker, "The Empress Has No Clothes: Amy Goodman's Reality Blackout." And it continued with "What Would It Be Like To Be Amy Goodman?" (September 2007).
..........So Rothschild sparked nothing, Cockburn sparked nothing, as neither did Ariana Huffington or the despicable Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker or Jacob Weisberg when in September 2006 he wrote his genuinely absurd "Five Years Free: Why Haven't We Been Attacked Again?" in Slate, a dim-witted non-think piece trounced by me as hard as I could trounce in "Our Enemies, the Left Gatekeepers." "What Can This Man Be Thinking?" That was my response after reading this bit of utter inanity in the Slate piece:
....................As the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, perhaps the most sur-
....................prising result is that American life has not changed very much at all. We
....................worry more about terrorism and have to allow more time to negotiate air-
....................port security. But amazingly, al-Qaida hasn't claimed a single additional
....................victim inside the United States. This fact is all the more remarkable when
....................you consider the special challenges America faces in preventing terror-
....................ism: thousands of miles of porous border; an open, mobile society; and
....................easy access to firearms.
..........Since I was perfectly aghast at such nonsense, I wrote, back then in December 2006,
....................After all, what surprise can there conceivably be in another 9/11 not hav-
....................ing taken place in five years? Since the Bushiscti themselves were the
....................perpetrators of 9/11, isn't it self-explanatory? The Bushiscti pulled off
....................their inside job, got away with it, and got what they wanted from it—
....................namely carte-blanche war-making powers from "congress," a wide open-
....................ing of the purse-strings for said war-making, an instantly-created imagin-
....................ary enemy to make war against, and, hardly least, the best opportunity
....................conceivable to begin their program of the crushing, or, if you wish, the
....................stripping away, of Constitutional liberties, starting with the so-called
....................Patriot Act and now—those famous five years later—having legalized
....................torture, gotten rid of habeas corpus, gutted the Insurrection Act, and
....................gotten "legislators" to ante up $38 million for spiffing up concentration
....................camps inside the U.S.—an event reported on this way by the Hono-
....................lulu Advertiser: "Notorious internment camps where Japanese-Ameri-
....................cans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II will be pre-
....................served as stark reminders of how the United States turned on some
....................of its citizens in a time of fear."
..........I could hardly believe my eyes or ears then and I can hardly believe them now. revisiting the scene. I asked:
....................Why is Jacob Weisberg so set upon being a self-blinded non-seer?
....................Why Frank Rich? Why Amy Goodman? Why David Corn? Why
....................Nicholas Lemann? What do they hope to gain? Do they think the
....................Bushiscti will be nice, or good, to them in return for their craven
....................fidelity when the rest of the nation goes to its ruin, falls into pen-
....................ury and need and want, or goes to the camps that are being pre-
....................pared or are prepared already for those who were faithless? Do the
....................gatekeepers actually trust in the Bushiscti and in the Cheneyiscti;
....................do they actually believe that, in payment for their complicity now
....................they'll be paid back later in the coin of favor? Could the gatekeepers
....................conceivably be that depraved; could the gatekeepers conceivably
....................be that deceived?
....................What else could explain it? How can anything explain it?
3
..........I wrote and nobody responded, silence ruled supreme, I heard nothing, knew nothing, could tell nothing. Of course, this could all have been due simply to my having had no readers. But the minute I took on Amy Goodman as a gatekeeper, letters from highly incensed readers arrived, bearing demands to be dropped from my list.
..........A typical angry one, from last May, went like this:
....................While I am [a signer] . . . of the 9/11 truth statement and I routinely
....................publish articles exploring 9/11 truth, your attack of Amy Goodman
....................and the statements you make here in this email about liberals and
....................progressives in general are toxic and destructive, and clearly des-
....................perate.
....................I still believe that the 9/11 commission was a coverup and [I?] even
....................commissioned polling that showed that the majority of Democrats
....................and over 40% of the public believe that the investigation was inad-
....................equate. But you are misguided. Please remove me from your mail-
....................ing list. NOW!! And don't respond to this email either. I will label as
....................spam any further email I receive from you.
..........The piece immediately in question was "The Traitors In Our House," which I'd turned over to two guest writers—though the piece before that one ("Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman") may have offended the writer equally.
..........But what's most interesting to me is what exactly it really was that has made the writer so angry. She or he referred not just to the articles about Amy Goodman but also to the May 2007 email that I'd sent out to my list along with "The Traitors In Our House." Here's that email:
....................Dear Readers of A Nation Gone Blind, Other Recipients, Writers, Thinkers,
....................Patriots, and Friends:
....................I can do no more than trust and hope that everyone really does understand
....................the reason for this series of pieces about Amy Goodman, or pieces largely
....................about her. The reason isn't to be unfair to Amy Goodman. The reason is to
....................analyze her work and then, if necessary and appropriate, to condemn cer-
....................tain aspects of her performance as a journalist. I've chosen to focus on
....................Goodman (although in truth she's hardly alone on the little stage of this web
....................site) partly because she's so clearly associated with the left-leaning and
...................."progressive," partly because she's so well known, partly because she's so
....................well trusted, partly because she's so well loved (by many), partly because
....................she's recently turned to writing instead of just radio—and partly because
....................she is so quintessentially typical of numerous other erstwhile progressive
....................or left-leaning American journalists and commentators who—known or
....................unbeknownst to themselves—have metamorphosed since 9/11 into the
....................greatest and most dangerous liars in the entire land outside of politicians
....................themselves or figures in the true mass media, like, say, executives for
....................Fox Films or corporate purveyors of pop music.
....................Harsh to say, perhaps, but it's the result of close examination, and I
....................believe it's true. Frank Rich, Nicholas Lemann, Matthew Rothschild,
....................Ariana Huffington, Jacob Weisberg, et al—the list is long, demoralizing,
....................and suggestive of a grave and extreme danger—a danger given sinister
....................but truthful implication by Paul Craig Roberts in his recent words, "Nor-
....................mally, this is called dictatorship." (See "The State or the People," April
....................2007)
....................In fact, Amy Goodman, Frank Rich, and all the others like them are
....................aiders and abettors in the bringing about of dictatorship to the United
....................States. This is so because they are all liars by omission—that is, by re-
....................fusing to acknowledge, credit, stand behind, or publish the truth about
....................9/11, they effectually both aid and permit the continuation of the guilty
....................and as yet unaccountable Bush administration's attack not only on the
....................Iraqi and Afghan people but also on the American people, in the last
....................case through gutting of the Constitution and clear and evident preparing
....................for the imposition of martial law and a police state.
....................[material about my guest authors deleted]
....................As for the actual situation: You may not agree, but it looks to me abso-
....................lutely clear that the criminals are on the loose; are in fact holding the
....................reins of government; are as yet beyond the reach of law or accountabil-
....................ity; and can be reined in and made accountable only through the just
....................and proper prosecution of those—that is, themselves—who are respon-
....................sible for the extraordinary crimes of 9/11.
....................Eric Larsen
..........Now, I wonder how many readers would agree that what I say here about Amy Goodman and "liberals and progressives in general" is really toxic and destructive," let alone "desperate." Granting that it was evidently toxic indeed to the angry letter—writer, why was it so toxic? Before getting at the answer to that question, though, let me give another example.
..........This is something more recent, just a week or two ago. I'd seen an essay attacking the Bush junta for its illegal war policies and calling for impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Since I admired it well enough and shared its views, I wrote the author:
....................10/1/2007
....................Hello, X. X.,
....................I saw your [unnamed] piece and think it's inestimably strong
....................and good and thorough and powerful. Thank you for it. I only,
....................only wish that more would come your way and bring about the
....................necessary impeachment you urge. Why is there such mad re-
....................sistance?
....................I'm working in similar veins, though usually from a more "liter-
....................ary" approach, but trying to expose hypocrisy in the press and
....................media, doing it in my own small ways. Also have a book out,
...................."A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and
....................Deceit." I'm afraid the co-opted media have been instructed or
....................have learned to ignore books of its kind, since notice has
....................been nil.
....................But may I put you on my list of people to alert when new
....................pieces go up on my site? Here's the most recent—today
....................—letter I've sent out. Just let me know if you want off. And
....................may your work prosper and harvest peace and good. The
....................times are bad.
....................Yours, Eric Larsen
..........To my own small horror, here is what I got back:
....................10/07/07
....................Mr. Larsen,
....................Please forgive me for being so tardy in answering your kind
....................email of Oct. 1—and now here is another.
....................I appreciate and applaud your stance on these interlocking
....................issues, and urge you to continue daylighting the one about
....................which you are far better informed than I am: the facts of 9/11.
....................Let me implore you, however, to cease the attacks on those
....................who fail to match your passion: the Amy Goodmans of the
....................world and, as you know, there are a lot of doubters on the
....................left. (Cf. Alexander Cockburn.) Internecine invective serves no
....................one but the True Believers, those who, tragically, have fallen
....................under the spell of the Bush intrigue.
....................We are all fighting the same war: the hideous presidency we
....................endure. There are many battlefields, and none is demonstrably
....................the only true and correct one. Yes, arguments can be made
....................to rebut that statement, but those who make them seem to
....................me more interested in being RIGHT than in a successful end-
....................ing of the nightmare.
....................Please do not send me any more criticisms of people I see
....................as effective antagonists to the Bush regime.
..........Am I alone in the world in thinking that the arguments in this letter and in the one preceding it are the sheerest—well, let me warble out "malarkey" in order to prevent myself from soiling the reader's screen with a truly vile or at the very least scatological term—? What are these letters and others like them saying? I might ask the second writer—I in fact did ask, in a follow-up letter, one that resulted in stony silence only—how he can conceivably see left-progressives like Goodman or Weisberg—or like "Frank Rich, Nicholas Lemann, Matthew Rothschild, Ariana Huffington, Jacob Weisberg, et al"—as being "effective antagonists to the Bush regime"? In what way is any of them being "effective"? In what way is any of them being "effective" in altering, ending, or ameliorating the course of the inhuman and wasteful wars in Iraq or Afghanistan? in helping diminish the threat of even wider wars through attack, perhaps nuclear, on Iran? in—above all—opposing a cowardly, complicit, and petrified congress in order actually to help bring about the impeachment of the Bush-Cheney junta, a Constitutional action without which we're doomed, at the very best, to a repetition of Bush-Cheney "policy," including increasing domestic lockdown, for at least another eight years no matter which "party" may sit in the White House or hold majority control of congress?
..........The "left-progressive" media is talking about such things, I'll immediately agree, but so help me god I can find no way under the stars or the sun or the heavens that they could rightly be declared as "effective" in opposition to the junta or its ruinous, rapacious, and murderous policies. Well, maybe they are "effective antagonists," as the writer said. But "antagonists," I would add, in the sense of flies on a cow's hide in summer—an irritation to be brushed away with a sweep of the tail.