Monday, May 25, 2009

It's a Fabulist Love Story

Mendacious Media Cuddles
With Deceitful Dick

It’s nasty work and no one has to do it, so let’s all drop trou and collectively moon the god awful pack of media satraps and stenos who have subjected us to the preposturies of Dick Cheney for the last few weeks.
At the least, his ample appearances give the lie to the old adage that you can’t bullshit a bullshitter. Indeed you can--and all the way down the garden path from Fox News to NPR and back again.
These Cheney deceitathons conjure up Baron Munchausen and Pinocchio doing the dozens on each other. Conventional wisdom characterizes them as attacks on Obama, a bid for yahoo leadership, an effort to regain/maintain control of national security policies, or defenses in anticipation of Cheney being indicted. Whatever, they amount to joint assaults on logic, reason and mental health by Cheney and his media castrati enablers.
The only thing interesting about these shows is how at variance they are with the zeitgeist. Cheney now rates with Darth Vader, Dracula and the devil himself in the almanac of evil. He’s on his way to replacing witches on Holloween costumes. Comic Wanda Sykes told the White House press dinner that she counseled her kids that if two cars pulled up to their school and Dick Cheney was in one, they should go instead with the scary-looking stranger. So the reporters and pundits who take him seriously are only advertising their remove from the rest of us.
Either they don’t know or they don’t care. The sacred duty of the American mainstream media is to give credibility to the incredible by repeating the lies of our rulers. They never stop assuring us that the emperor has all his clothes on even when he's nakedly screwing us.
If there are any among the the media who cling to a residual shred of reality, they could easily hold up a crucifix to Cheney and send him back to his crypt in the nether world simply by posing the following questions to him:
1. For those of us who believe that the Bush administration started on January 20 and not September 11, 2001, wouldn’t it be fair to apportion a good deal of blame for 9/11 on those who ignored 52 warnings and treated terrorism as a minor matter?
2. According to you, we have been winning the Iraq war for more than twice as long as it took to win the second world war. How many more years--or decades--do you expect the lethal victory parade to last?
3. If torture works, it’s reasonable to assume that one of your waterboardees would have given up Osama bin Laden by now. So where is he?
Any such questions would signify a return of journalism, which we as all know is currently undergoing rendition at an unknown location.