Sunday, November 02, 2008

McCain's 'Real-ly Stupid' America

By Robert Parry
November 2, 2008

Sarah Palin may be wrong about the existence of a “real” America where people are decent and patriotic – and a “fake” America where they’re not. But John McCain’s election chances now appear to hinge on the existence of a “real-ly stupid” America.

Read on.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does ConsortiumNews have anything critical to report about Obama?

Sun Nov 02, 06:11:00 PM 2008
Anonymous said...

Anony --

The answer to your question is: No.

Basically, ConsortiumNews does what it accuses the McCain campaign of doing. ConNews chooses to cherrypick anything and everything that they can find to denigrate McCain, but they find nothing to hold Obama accountable for in his inflated or unsubstantiated remarks.

I guess, Anony, it's Robert Parry's version of fair and balanced.

Sun Nov 02, 11:02:00 PM 2008
Anonymous said...

Here's a list of the most unbiased articles of this election:

http://blog.skewz.com/2008/11/top-7-most-unbiased-articles-of.html

Mon Nov 03, 08:02:00 PM 2008
knowbuddhau said...

Mr. Parry, I will always be in your debt for bursting my "America Can Do No Wrong" bubble back in the 80s, with your Iran-Contra stories. It's in that context that I became politically aware. You stand tall in my pantheon of journalistic heroes.

I hope you can answer a question that deeply perplexes me.

I never see it in analyses of GOP campaigning, yet it appears beyond abundantly clear to me. It's an effort to control us by putting The Fear into us. Fear of god, communists, terrorists; fear of the Other.

Psychology and advertising aka "Public Relations," aka the manufacture of consent, are a terrible twosome. We invented ways of jacking whole nations to hell--or just one voting bloc at a time--and then sticking them with the bill.

The most successful--and therefore, infamous--practitioners of this method were Paul Joseph Goebbels and his minions. "Goebbels was known for his zealous, energetic oratory, and venomous anti-Semitism; he is held responsible for Kristallnacht by many historians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels). Hermann Goering announced it in 1934:

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/25/body_of_war_new_doc_tells

German rocket science wasn't the only thing we imported after WWII. This was obviously McCarthy's method. I say, it's Rove's method, too.

As a Zen poet and (non-matriculating) grad student of psychology, I see clearly that someone is using black psy ops on us.

"We imported fascism," Gore Vidal says in a The Real News clip I found right here on this site (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoLd7OLg53s).

NAOMI KLEIN: "And so, the Chicago Boys were born. And it was considered a success... [H]undreds and hundreds of Latin American students, on full scholarships, came to the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s to study here to try to engage in what Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile"s foreign minister after the dictatorship finally ended, described as a project of deliberate ideological transfer, taking these extreme-right ideas, that were seen as marginal even in the United States, and transplanting them to Latin America. That was his phrase--that is his phrase." http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein

So why doesn't anybody else point out this obvious fact? Why say things like you did, in this article: "Since mid-summer, the McCain campaign has devolved into silly arguments mixed with guilt-by-association smears:...."?

Why not call it as it is: our new and improved method for manufacturing consent, to myth-jack to hell whole populations at a time--or just one voting bloc--and then stick them with the bill? And why not KEEP CALLING IT THAT?

It's been the deliberate method of the GOP since McCarthy. Democrats have made use of the power of myth, too. Remember "Camelot on the Potomac"?

Joseph Campbell began lecturing at the State Department's Foreign Services Institute in 1957. He brags of it in a lecture (which I'm still trying to pin down) saying, "The State Department is an association of very learn-ed gentlemen. They Know What To Do."

Campbell later supported the Vietnam war. He had nothing but disdain for the anti-war movement. He uses many examples of the heroism of our servicemen (one of whom, on the USS Kitty Hawk, was my father; thankfully he came home alive, but not the same). I've never heard or read him saying the same of his opponents. He even made disdainful remarks about Rev. King, saying that his self-identification as a particular type of man, instead of a universal one, showed his immaturity.

(Lest anyone think this is a hit piece on him, I hasten to point out that, as a poet, I revere Campbell's works. I met his widow, Jean Erdman Campbell, 4 years ago, at the centennial celebration of his birth, held at the Esdalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, during the 3rd week in March, my natal week. at which time it had been his tradition to lecture there for almost 40 years. I consider myself a Campbellian when it comes to comparative mythology.)

Why don't more journalists call this method what it so obviously is? My hunch is, as Americans, we conflate Christianity with religion, and journalists avoid religion like the plague when discussing domestic politics, yet they never fail to point out the sectarian affiliations of others.

But religion is only a subordinate function of mythology. A religion, as I'm sure you know, functions like a country club. Some are run as dominions of white male supremacy; others, far more charitably.

This leaves us wide open to getting jacked by one myth after another. Back in the day, it was the myth of the Domino Theory (Nicaraguans are set to invade us, claimed Reagan). In this campaign, we've seen the attempt to jack the election with one myth after another. It's all of a piece.

I'd greatly appreciate it if you could relieve me of this deeply troubling perplexity.

Wed Nov 05, 10:38:00 PM 2008

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