A few weeks ago the right wing media’s latest scam scandal — hereinafter known as a scamdal — was about the mainstream media supposedly hyping the story of Ted Cruz in Cancun, while burying allegations against Andrew Cuomo.
Surprise, it wasn’t true. The Cruz story is long gone from the MSM, while Cuomo is still leading, because there have been no new developments on Cruz and lots on Cuomo. But RW outlets issued no corrections to their scamdal; they just moved on to the next one.
Hence Dr. Seuss and the Potatoheads.
People who ignore RW media probably don’t appreciate that this happens every day, year round. The infinite cycle goes like this:
- “Expose” a scamdal.
- Demand to know why the mainstream media isn’t covering it. (If the story has actual news value, the MSM is covering it, but devoted RW media consumers won’t know that. If as is so often the case the story is just bull, that’s kind of a deal-breaker for legitimate journalists.)
- Go “in depth” behind the “crisis,” filling the schedule.
- As the story starts to feel a little old — scamdals must always be new and urgent — milk it once more in the weekly roundup of “stories the mainstream media didn’t want you to hear.”
- Add it to the “evergreen” stock, along with Birtherism, Benghazi, Hillary’s emails, Fast and Furious, transgender bathroom marauders, and all the other never-corrected, ever-remembered scamdals — all of which add up to just one message, repeated over and over and over, because it’s so lucrative:
“Trust no one but us, so you’ll buy whatever we sell.”
^ typo ‘doesn’t work’
Recaptcha does work, so I couldn’t send this via contact form:
Hi Spencer. Saw your interview with Oksana on RT. I’d simply point out the absolute consistency/continuity from Bush to Obama to Trump (and now no doubt Biden) when it comes to the international crimes of our secret services (intelligence agencies.) The showcase would be Enrique Prado who retired from the CIA with rank equal to a two star general in a career where he’d doubled as a hit man (“technically a serial killer”) for a narcotics cartel and lives free to this day despite state and federal task forces producing a proverbial ‘mountain of evidence’ (beyond what would) necessary to convict him. That, and recalling Obama’s ‘kill list Tuesdays’ (extra-judicial assassinations, includes American citizens abroad), I think you have some myopia (political cultural bias) to overcome. Sure, Trump is corrupt and probably criminal but that doesn’t make the other side innocent. Boyko made mincemeat of you on Libya. That’s all.
https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2017/03/08/the-cias-amazon-books/
On Libya, there’s little argument, including from Obama, that the aftermath was very bad, though for various reasons, with important ones outside of Obama’s control. But the summary of what led up to it, missing from Oksana’s description, is this: Gaddafi was slaughtering his own people “like rats,” in his own words. Libyans, and the Arab League, were begging for an intervention. Arab and European nations joined in. Russia let it go forward at the UN by declining to veto in the Security Council; meanwhile then-President Medvedev had said Gaddafi had lost his legitimacy and should step down.
Afterwards, Putin apparently decided to use the operation they had tacitly approved as a cudgel against the US, and it still seems to be a favorite talking point. If there were something to it beyond that, it would be worth listening to despite Russia’s record elsewhere. But in the absence of that we’re left with criticism of Obama, among the most conscientious world leaders we’ve seen, from a government that does things like help Syria’s Assad barrel-bomb civilian neighborhoods and hospitals.
It’s also widely agreed that the CIA has committed abuses in the past, but I think you’re grossly over-simplifying here. For example, after past abuses have been exposed, laws and regulations have changed, and CIA behavior has changed. Norms like the rule of law still exist and still matter, even if they’ve been violated in the past. If we deny that, we have binary thinking that leads to nihilism: either perfection or “everyone’s the same.” This requires the erasure of crucial differences, as in the assertion that Obama is solely responsible for everything bad that had happened in Libya, while Gaddafi disappears from the story, as do Libyans trying desperately to free themselves from him, his internal rivals who had various motives, other Arab countries, Europe, and Russia.
The US is not about the same as Russia and neither was Obama about the same as Trump, as is easy to see by imagining the difference between the four years we just had, and the four years we would have had under any reasonably honest, competent, and stable president, let alone Obama.