The Coming Disaster For The Left Is Brought To You By "The Left" And The Media It Worships

When I first started blogging my theme was how the left could get smart and start winning elections again so we could make the kind of change I was talking about in my next to last post.   That is still my overarching theme. There are definite problems with "the left" and one of those problems is that "the left" largely figures there are no problems with it.  But we haven't elected but one genuine liberal as president in the last century, Franklin Roosevelt.  And he wasn't any kind of leftist as that term is usually understood.   His closest rival for that position in that time, in terms of actual radical achievement, is Lyndon Johnson and he waren't any kind ah liberal.  You should read that last clause with a Maine accent, by the way.   On top of that we've been consistently losing elections since then.  We've been loosing them, not only to centrist Democrats but to some of the worst and most obvious liars and crooks who have steadily undermined the well being of The People and the entire biosphere.  Something is obviously not not broke with the left and it's time we faced that so we can find ways to fix it.

Who is to blame?   Well, a lot of the blame can go straight on TV.  TV has been a constant source of propaganda for the right, it got Nixon elected in 1968 even as he pretended the media hated him.   As someone who remembers that year as if it were yesterday,  TV was a constant source of propaganda for Nixon and against Hubert Humphrey and was unquestionably instrumental in getting one of the most bizarre, unappealing and most crooked men elected to the presidency in our history. Oh, and, even as the corporate media was attacking Humphrey in 1968, "the left" was also attacking him. Understandably over his position on the War in Vietnam, though his positions would have almost certainly ended it faster than Nixon most certainly did not and never had any intention of doing as he expanded it into surrounding countries, leading to the Khmer Rouge, among other things.

The media was also instrumental in destroying the reputation of George McGovern in 1972, one of the most decent, honest and competent men who has ever run for that office.  It did that even as it was becoming obvious how entirely and pathologically corrupt Nixon was.   And what TV did for Nixon it has done for a steady stream of increasingly right-wing Republicans.  Reagan,  Bush I, Bush II and numerous candidates for lower office.  And there was the non-stop campaign to make "liberal" a dirty word and a word of scorn. That was so pervasive that even the token liberal of many of those years,  Phil Donahue,  generally used it as a synonym for everything flakey and foolish.  So, TV is guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt.

But, there's a big problem with fixing that.  Lots and lots of liberals are against regulating TV to force it to stop lying for the opponents of liberalism.   Reimposition of The Fairness Doctrine, public service requirements, protecting children from the lies of advertisers.... is opposed by a considerable faction of people who are believed and who believe themselves to be of the left.   The media must not be restricted or the shades of Jefferson and Madison will weep?  Or something like that.  Perhaps a clue to this is that it was Ronald Reagan who got rid of those things, in a quintessentially conservative move.  And there has been no greater beneficiary of that deregulation than Rupert Murdoch, the man who elected Margaret Thatcher in Britain and who has done so much to destroy liberalism in the United States.  Oh, and lying, pathologically deranged corporation and oligarchy supporting hate talk radio which, free from regulation, is what the corporations that control radio chose to put on.   Reagan and the Republican right knew they had nothing to fear from an unregulated press, they'd been among their greatest beneficiaries,  getting rid of those requirements were the mutually beneficial reward to the media for a job done well.

You might almost get the idea that lassez faire was not working out so well for liberalism and The People who liberals are supposed to be supporting.  I seem to have some vague recollection of something similar happening in the late 19th and early 20th..... But why bother with that old stuff when it's so much cooler to hate on regulation.  Oddly enough, that seems to generally happen when liberals adopt ideas and policies that are good for corporate media, as almost all but the tiniest fraction of TV and radio are.  There is definitely something wrong with an idea as a "liberal" or "progressive" idea when the position taken by Herbert Hoover turned out, in real life, to be more favorable to liberals actually holding office and passing liberal laws.  Real life is the real test for any theory, including those of government and that "liberal" idea has failed so many tests of time that it should have died in the 1970s.  Yet it is more pervasive than ever.

And there's a real and obvious reason for that.   Liberals of the kind who think it's entirely more important that Rupert Murdoch get to broadcast whatever he finds profitable and the entire radio spectrum to spew lies and hatred of liberals and women and minority groups of all kinds than actually taking office are no liberals at all, they are not leftists at all, they are are actually libertarians with a liberalish cover.

Liberalism has, in the past four decades, become so thoroughly corroded that their position has supplanted traditional American liberalism.  When Herbert Hoover's positions turn out to be better for liberals, when they require corporations to serve the public more than the "liberal" position, that particular "liberal" position is fraud.  That Mr. Free Speech-Free Press Nat Hentoff has gone from The Village Voice to The Cato Institute and World Net Daily is no accident, it is no fluke, it is only a clearer example of this phenomenon. Almost all of the electronic media "liberals" you can name are certainly libertarians when it comes to the business they work in.  I'd like to know how many of them regularly discuss things like making their medium serve the interest of The People, especially those who need that.  I mean on-air or on-cable where it really has a chance to cause some kind of effect in reality

I could go over example after example of how the pseudo-liberal position destroys the chances of liberals to gain office and make policy, almost all of it pushed and promoted by people working in media, people who have a financial interest in its deregulation and people employed by those who have a financial interest in its deregulation. But I'm going to cut to the current set up job they're constructing.   I believe it is leading us on the path to what may be the biggest fall the left has taken in a long time,  the Snowden cult and the perhaps somewhat lesser cult of Glenn Greenwald.

For all the reasons I've noted here and elsewhere in the past two weeks, the Snowden affair is almost certainly based on a rather transparent lie, that Snowden has some great and wonderful goal of protecting privacy from government spying, of exposing wrong doing by the U.S. government*.

From his perch, protected by the authoritarian Russian government that has been implicated in the murders of numerous reporters - real and courageous journalists truly critical of a really oppressive and corrupt government -  we are seriously supposed to believe that Snowden is some kind of beacon of civil liberties. That is how he is presented in the press, either directly or by his proxy, Glenn Greenwald.  Even as Glenn Greenwald is praising him for things like intentionally releasing classified information about the United States government spying on China in order to ingratiate himself to that other beacon of privacy and freedom, to get them to protect him against the government of the United States.

And now Greenwald and the American media are claiming the right of the Brazilian partner of Greenwald to the protection of the very American Government all of the above are engaged in attacking, WHILE HE WAS IN TRANSIT FROM BERLIN, THROUGH BRITAIN, TO BRAZIL, CARRYING MATERIALS THAT ARE, BY GREENWALD'S OWN ADMISSION HOSTILE TO THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES!   I'm not going to apologize for saying that there is something pathologically bratty and entitled about that.

Sooner or later, and I'm inclined to believe it will be timed for the mid-term elections next year, the defection and betrayals of Edward Snowden will be revealed with real compromises of American security and interests if not far worse consequences.

And who is going to take the fall for that?   Why the "liberal" media that has grasped the boy to their bosom and defended him from the government of the United States and, specifically Barack Obama, the second closest thing to a liberal the American left has managed to elect since FDR's last election campaign.   Jimmy Carter, also noted for not having all that much support from liberals, being the closest thing to a philosophical liberal in that time.  And not the media "liberals" who will be suitably chastened and apologetic and accept the blame for all of us who never thought he was anything but an idiot if not an actual crook and phony, and, yes, a traitor, in the informal though not legal sense of the word

Once again the liberalish-libertarians and the media that has defined liberalism as comprising their political program has set up the real left to take an enormous fall.   We have got to get over the phony-Jeffersonian fetish for a deregulated mass media that is part and parcel of that artificial substitue.  They will lie to the disadvantage of real liberalism every single time.  They set us up over and over again.  They will sell lies as absurd as that Edward Snowden is some beacon of freedom liberty even as he prefers to go flee to China, which has performed the miracle of combining the worst of totalitarian one-party government with the worst of Victorian era corporate lassez faire economics.   And who is now being run by Putin's government in Russia.  I haven't seen many media figures glorifying Snowden and Greenwald speculate what would happen to a Chinese or Russian defector who came here with massive amounts of government secrets and how they and the equivalents of Greenwald and Poitras would be treated by their government.   I strongly suspect that the equivalent of Miranda would have died mysteriously in a robbery with something like an iridium pellet laced with some exotic poison being used to subdue him.  Someone's body would probably show evidence oddly suggestive of exposure to unnatural levels of polonium.

Having seen how the media "liberals" have set us up over and over again, I'm going to risk a charge of paranoia in saying that there seems to be a pattern developing and in looking at that pattern one of the useful clues in why the left keeps losing might reside.  I'd look closely at the large financial incentive of such people. Playing a liberal in the mass media pays so much better than being a real one in the real world.  To use a phony quote invented by them, follow the money.

*Which, as everyone is supposed to know, is the greatest force for evil in the entire world.  Why, liberals have been telling us how the federal government is the locus of all evil from the time of John C. Calhoun, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley jr...  And, today, it is the free mass media who are warning us of the same thing.