Deck Deckert

FOUL! I say

Online polls are notoriously unscientific, but the corporate media loves them

-- unless the wrong guy wins, of course.

When antiwar Rep. Ron Paul won an MSNBC online poll, it was yanked off their website faster than you can say 'the corporate media are rightwing shills.' The poll showed that the Texas Congressman won the Tuesday night GOP Michigan debate in a landslide, getting 86% of the online vote.

In explaining their decision, CNBC managing editor Allen Wastler said it was because Paul supporters "flooded" the poll and it was his duty to pull it because "I haven't seen him pull those kind of numbers in any 'legit' poll."

Unh huh.

But if a corporate favorite like Rudy Giuliani had got those numbers?

Outrage

U.S. troops backed by attack aircraft killed 19 suspected insurgents and 15 civilians northwest of Baghdad today. Nine of the dead were children.

Notice that the military dispatch said the "insurgents" were "suspected insurgents." That means, of course, that undoubtedly some of them were not fighters but were also civilians.

Antiwar.com keeps a running tab on the Iraq war. Today, for example, the death toll was:
89 Iraqis
1 GI

That's pretty much the norm. In a war we started, in a country we occupy, the death toll is usually more than 50 Iraqis to 1 American, sometimes a lot more.

And the dead American is usually a soldier; most of the Iraqi dead are civilians.

Why is nobody outraged?

There are numerous reasons for that ratio. Some of those died without any Americans present in the civil war that we refuse to acknowledge is happening. But far too many are directly killed by American forces.

I repeat: Why is nobody outraged at this wanton slaughter?

Good question

"The residents of a remote northern Wisconsin community," AP says, "struggled to understand Monday how a sheriff's deputy who killed six young people and critically wounded another could have become a law enforcement officer."

Good question, but an even better one is why AP and the rest of corporate media never seem to worry about things like that when it comes to an aging monster in Washington. I suggest a story that begins:

"The residents of the United States struggled to understand Monday how a man who killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousand Iraqis people could have become president."

The Israeli Lobby

I was considering commenting on the power of the Israeli Lobby in light of all the fuss about the book the book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I had seen a bit of that power myself when I worked as a newsman.

I began with a Google search for a couple of incidents I personally knew about, one of them being the shooting down of a civilian airliner in the 70s. I don't know whether I has anything to do with the power of the Israel lobby today, but I had a devil of a time finding any information with Google and Ask.com, and some of that came from anti-Semitic websites, not the best of sources.

Finally I found some good information from a website called Swans, written by the fellow called Deck Deckert. [g] I had written the piece, The Untouchable Israelis, on April 8, 2002. It started:

"There are a lot of taboos and untouchable stories in the Establishment Media -- corporate crime, racism, the insanity of the failed drug war, criticism of the war budget, corporate control of government, Bush gaffes, etc..

"But one of the oldest and currently the most powerful taboo is this: One must never speak ill of Israel. No matter how savage or barbaric Israel's actions, the American media, following the example of the American government, offers unquestioning support.

"The key word is 'unquestioning' -- no criticism, no expressions of doubt. Anyone who dares express the mildest criticism of Israel is likely to be hit with the nuclear bomb of public discourse -- a label of anti-Semitism."

I went on to relate a couple of personal incidents I had witnessed as a newsman, including that airliner downing. On Feb. 21, 1973, Israeli fighter planes shot down a Libyan civilian airliner, killing all on board. It wasn't the downing of an airliner — there have been numerous incidents of airliners being shot down in war zones --- it was the aftermath.

As I said in the Swans piece, "When the story broke, I passed it on to the news editor and prepared to handle the updates and the sidebars ... I was expecting details about weather conditions that contributed to the crash, profiles of some of the people who died, interviews with their families, analysis of why Israel would shoot down an airliner, comments from U.S. and Israeli authorities and public figures. I waited in vain. Updates were sparse, sidebars nearly non-existent. ...the story was essentially a one-edition splash and then disappeared."

In contrast, when 10 years later the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner, the media and politicians became hysterical. They averred that the incident was proof that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. TV newscasts and newspapers were filled with stories about the depravity of the Soviets, features about the passengers lost in the shootdown, and the condemnation by politicians and pundits of all types. The story went on for weeks.

But Israel has always escaped that kind of scrutiny in America.

Anyone interested in reading the whole story I wrote on Swans five years ago, can find it at:
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/rdeck018.html

Using the judiciary

The Iranian judiciary has shut down a website which has been critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration, something that can't happen in America, at least not yet.

President Bush isn't trying to use the American judiciary to shut down websites. He is simply grateful that the Supreme Court stopped ballot counting in Florida and appointed him president in the first place.
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The courageous Senate

The U.S. Senate won't get us out of Iraq, won't support the troops with more time at home, but they courageously condemned a newspaper ad.

By a 72-25 vote, they passed a resolution condemning an ad in The New York Times by the MoveOn.org. which taunted Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, as "General Betray Us" because he is a mouthpiece for Bush's ugly and outrageous war.

With wisdom and encourage like that, how can we fail?
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THE NON-STORY

Against the Iraq war? Who cares?

No one is paying any attention. Not Bush, of course; not Congress; not the corporate media.

There was an antiwar/pro-impeachment rally in Washington, DC yesterday, the seat of government, the place where thousands of media eyes are focused.

It was almost invisible. Thousands of people marched, nearly two hundred were arrested. The print media yawned. I don't know what TV coverage was like, since I never watch TV news anymore, but newspapers paid it little mind.

A spot check of the Sunday front page of nearly 200 newspapers showed no significant interest in the story. There was no mention of it on the front page of most of the papers I checked.

There were a few exceptions: The Stockton, CA Record carried it on the front page; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a front-page picture referring to a story inside; and the Louisville Courier-Journal carried a small story on the bottom of page 1.

The rest? zilch.

A paper in Illinois had a front-page lead story on a local soldier killed in Iraq, but not a word about the Washington demonstrations.

There were stories on donuts, property values, etc. And there were lots of stories on football.

But a demonstration in the nation's capital against trillion-dollar war that has killed thousands of Americans, and probably a million Iraqi's was too insignificant for the front page.

And the question of impeachment also raised by demonstrators? Hardly if ever mentioned.

Now get ready for the war against Iran.
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Conversation

Nearly every American would be offended by the mere thought. The few who do think it are afraid to say so, for the crazy right which is in charge of our media and our government would scream and rant that anyone voicing such an opinion is, at the very least, a traitor. But it has to be said:

In our foreign-policy, we are getting more and more like Nazi Germany under Hitler, invading countries at the will of our Fuhrer.

Of course, Hitler attacked the military powerhouses of the day; we attack and sometimes invade helpless nations. In the past few decades alone, we have attacked Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq... the list is incomplete.

And if we don't rein in the president and the Congress, the next attack will be on Iran. And God help us all.

In Usenet, the mention of Hitler is supposed to be a conversation stopper. But we had better take a hard look at our similarities to the monster of the 20th Century, before we become the monster of the 21st.

This can't be a conversation stopper; the conversation is just beginning.

New impeachment idea

I began promoting impeachment five years ago when Bush and the neocons, with a lot of help from the media, first lied us into war. I was writing at the time for an online magazine that saw itself as progressive, but the editor/owner was dismissive of my articles even as he ran them.

Most “liberals” in Congress are still afraid of impeachment, although they will offer you a dozen “rational” reasons why it’s a bad idea: it’s too late, Bush is self-destructing already, we don’t have the votes, if we don’t rock the boat democrats will be a shoe in, etc.

So I no longer promote the impeachment of Bush; well, not Bush alone, anyhow.

Can we impeach Congress?
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Worthwhile chain letter

I got an e-mail chain letter today asking me to "please join us in this FLY THE FLAG campaign and to PLEASE forward this immediately to everyone in your address book asking them to also forward it..."

It is, of course, a thinly disguised bit of propaganda to support Bush and his ugly war.

I have a better idea for a different chain letter e-mail. It goes like this:

Please join us in this IMPEACH BUSH campaign and please forward this email immediately to everyone in your address book asking them to also forward it. We have very little time to stop this dangerous lunatic before he starts a new war in Iran that will make the Iraq disaster look like a day in the park.

If I was inclined to send a chain letter, that is the one I would send.
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