IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD IT yet, I'd recommend you go to MSNBC and, or YouTube and listen to Rachel Maddow's reporting about the scandals in the Secret Service. I'd give a link but for some reason that's not working so well for me, today. I hadn't remembered or had never learned the extent to which Richard Nixon corrupted the agency during his crime spree. It's always worth remembering how far back the corruption of the Republican-fascist party goes and how obvious it was and how the media, those watch-dogs of democracy (as they'll never fail to assert themselves to be) have let the fascists get away with stuff to an incredible extent.
That today's Secret Service is apparently little to nothing to do with the Hollywood bullshit propaganda about them shouldn't be a surprise. Hollywood is the capital city of lies, well, apart from New York City and DC, the locus where the "news" part of the media operates. But Hollywood and its bull shit like that Eastwood movie is what misinforms the majority of Americans, producing memorable lies that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with propaganda promoted by those with an interest in lying.
I'm thinking of turning this into a regular thing, only if I tried to make it comprehensive it would take over the entire blog. There should be something like the great and ever important Retraction Watch for exposing the lies that come out of the entertainment media because that's what most people watch and consume and are manipulated by and which packages lies most successfully for easy consumption. If I were young I might try it. But, as I said, it would be a full time job.
People who know the FBI doesn't employ Fox Mulder (I suspect there are fewer and fewer such people these days) still think the FBI emplys Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (and has a fleet of Ford cars). That show was popular propaganda in the days of COINTELPRO and Hoover's files on every public figure in America that kept him in power long past his sell-by date. None of which reality made it into the popular TeeVee show.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there was "Dragnet," based on "true stories" that never showed the emotionless robot cops engaging withi blacks or Latinos (or Asians, for that matter), and certainly never showed any beat officer gunning down a "perp" just because he could.
Reality was never allowed to offend fantasy, which became ever more fantastical with "Dirty Harry," who introduced full-blown fascism to entertainment law enforcement (one strong man alone can defeat the forces of evil arrayed against the good and innocent).
Now, of course, the problem is not that police shoot people with impunity; it's that the blacks they disproportionately kill are publicly objecting. MTG called such protests an "insurrection" on the floor of the House today, proving she doesn't even know what the word means. Fortunately, the courts still do.