Friday, February 6, 2015

Final Jeopardy Category: Distractions

I'll take "Media Scandals" for a buck, Alex.

A: This memory-impaired but suave multimillionaire stud muffin will keep his infotainment job because the American sponge-colonies love that he puts the hunkiness and happiness back into global atrocities and human misery and boring government propaganda.

Q: Who is #LyinBrian? 

Absolutely correct!  Everybody loves it when elites are temporarily scorned for their lies, but rise again when they 'umbly admit that "mistakes were made". Americans also love dynasties, as in elite pundit's daughter gets the starring role (Peter Pan) on the same network where Daddy reads from a teleprompter for half an hour every night and lobs incestuous softball questions at presidents and their kin and other ruling class racketeers. Plus, he is hot. Just ask Buzz Feed.


No Lie: Brian Actually Hired Chelsea Clinton, Whose Mom Also Lied About Sniper Fire


A: This dorky but dapper New York Times pundit falsely claimed psychological damage from chronic exposure to vituperative reader comments, but claims to love his bullies anyway.

Q: Who is David Brooks?


Brooks: I Do Unto Others

 Right again, contestant!  Our Mister Brooks is vying for MVP on Brian Williams' farm team (The League of Mendacious Self-Aggrandizing Overpaid Pundits) by  pleading service-related PTSD. You see, David Brooks admitted last summer that he hasn't really sullied his eyeballs with reader comments for years. Rather, he pays (or more likely doesn't pay) his minions to dredge through the bile and hand him a couple of fawning tributes to boost his inflated ego. But in today's column, a mistake was made and he forgetfully claimed his feelings are hurt when he reads all the comments. He used his hurt feelings to construct a pulpit from which to preach empathy and world peace. If David Brooks can rise above all the mean-girliness, then so should our elected warmongering leaders. To be fair, Brooks's hypocrisy and fibbing don't rise to the level of #LyinBrian, but it's still well within the psychopathic personality disorder spectrum. And even if #BrooksIsAJerk goes viral, the man himself needn't worry, because he doesn't have a Twitter account. "I don't have a lot of ideas, so I'm not going to waste them on Twitter," he told Katie Couric at the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer.

A: This overpaid CNN anchor is the favorite for this year's Overpaid Pundit Award for best exhibitionist performance by an ignoramus.

Q. This is a wild guess, Alex, but based on his idiocy in Ferguson and that bit with the toy airplane crashing in a make-believe ocean... is it Don Lemon?

 Three times a charm, gamer! In the wake of that other viral distraction and looming Jeopardy category called To Vax or Not to Vax, Don stripped down on Twitter to show off his "measles vaccination" scar on some pretty buff musculature.


 Unfortunately for Don, he misremembered that it was a Smallpox vaccination scar. Not to be undone by the ensuing Twitter blast, however, he doubled down and then claimed his scar was a combo Measles-Smallpox souvenir, or Smeasles. Smallpox vaccinations were never part of the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) regimen. They predated the MMR regimen. They don't do scars any more because Smallpox has been eradicated. (Notwithstanding those little incidents at the NIH and the CDC.)

Congratulations. You just won a buck (not three, because game show cash awards are cheap-ass, in solidarity with your wages) and a copy of our home game. Taxes are your responsibility. Waivers must be signed.

Q. But Alex. Won't Don Lemon and David Brooks and Brian Williams get fired or at least have a pox put on all their houses?

A. No, you silly little prole. The rich and famous are immunized from accountability. The public loves to gawk. They're hooked on click-bait. They imagine that pundits read their comments or otherwise care about them. People love to be distracted. Most people don't care about the truth, they only care about how entertaining the stories are at the end of their minimum wage double shifts. That is how, when the planet is alternately burning, flooding, and freezing, the Obama administration is able to start a new war every week, ram through secretive corporate coups and call them "trade deals," and otherwise sell out democracy.

They want you to fly your doomed little toy airplanes into Don Lemon's black hole of forgetfulness.





12 comments:

Kat said...

I left a comment to the Brian Williams story. I stated that I was less concerned with this lie than the fact that NBC relies on military analysts who work for defense contractors.
75% of the evening news broadcasts seem to be humping for the military and perpetual war. Every enlisted man or woman is "brave" and a "hero", unless they speak out against the war. Then they are "nonexistent".

Denis Neville said...

A: Instead of hiring an experienced and talented person of color, many of whom are repeatedly denied opportunities on cable TV, MSNBC hired this craven opportunist. He once said he turned government informant, wearing a wire for the Feds, in a heroic effort to stand up Italian mobsters. But truth be known, he was instead King Rat, saving his own ass after a federal drug sting. Thus, confirming other allegations that he also worked as a federal informant, rating on Black radicals, during the same time period. He is now the kleptocracy’s priest of all things racial in America, the go-to guy, the "bonafide house negro of the Barack Obama plantation."

Q: Who is the Reverend Al Sharpton?

The deference, respect and reverence that he is treated with on MSNBC makes me want to puke! How I miss the Reverend Martin Luther King, who spoke for oppressed people of all colors throughout the world.

Patricia M. said...

More:

Obama preparing to request war powers . . . .

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28461-obama-said-to-be-preparing-to-request-war-powers

And Ukraine?

Patricia M. said...

None of this is about the U.S. It is about Obama.

Denis Neville said...

Everyone is ripping Brian Williams a new asshole for his lies, but cheering wildly the propagandistic movie “American Sniper” that is filled with lies.

“Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.” - Chris Hedges

The attraction of war is that its carnage gives some what they long for in life: purpose, meaning, and a reason for living.

Poseurs, fakes, and wannabes, wake up one day and discover time has passed them by. So they become legends in their own minds, living their lies. It’s chic to be a door-gunner on a helicopter gunship in combat.

Shakespeare’s Henry V’s speech captures this manipulative bit of war propaganda:

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;”

“And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day.”

—Shakespeare, Henry V

Obama preparing to request war powers . . . Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen …

Now once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more; close the wall up with our American dead!

voice-in-wilderness said...

I find it fascinating that someone like Brian Williams is still considered a big deal, i.e., a source of authority and news, rather than just being a pretty face that reads news, sometimes in exotic locations.

annenigma said...

Q: This 5'7" former KGB Colonel and current President of a nuclear armed country was diagnosed by a Pentagon think tank in 2008 as (supposedly) having Aspergers Syndrome.

A: Yes, it's Vladimir Putin who must be dusting off an extra long(range) missile to ram up the butt of The Beast about now.

It's too bad for Europe that they're the Beast's Bitch. Don't bend over, EU! Merkel and Hollande are visiting Russia to cut a peace deal because they have finally realized that the Beast craves war but is a NIMBY war addict.

In a crazy world where a Beast runs wild and eats up everything in its wake for the energy to sustain profits, a couple of precision nuclear strikes on locations where hundreds of thousands of civilians can be burned alive instantly might be considered reasonable and justified, a necessary game changer. Sound familiar?

Look! There's Halley's Comet! Oh wait...

Pearl said...

US Deports Professor Sami Al-Arian for Criticizing Israel and Backing Palestinian Rights http://shar.es/1oZ60z via @sharethis

Unknown said...

Thank you, Pearl, for posting the deportation of Professor Sami Al-Arian. To what depths have we sunk. Every day brings more distressing news - the loss of more precious people whose untold contributions we have lost.

I'd like to take note and mark the suffering of those who have recently paid a terrible price.

Shaimaa-El-Sabbagh, a young Egyptian mother, poet, and folklorist - shot down in the street in Egypt.

Jeffrey Sterling, convicted cynically and incredibly by our government of "espionage."

Kayla Mueller, who apparently has been killed in Syria in a Jordanian air strike.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of "Guantanamo Diary," and prisoner at Guantanamo, with apparently little hope of ever being released.

Shaimaa-El-Sabbagh
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/world/middleeast/video-analysis-suggests-egyptian-officer-shot-protester-rights-group-says.html?emc=eta1
http://www.arabamerica.com/a-letter-in-my-purse-from-slain-poet-shaimaa-el-sabbagh/

Mohamedou Ould Slahi
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/books/review/guantanamo-diary-by-mohamedou-ould-slahi.html?_r=0

Jeffrey Sterling
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/us/politics/cia-officer-in-leak-case-jeffrey-sterling-is-convicted-of-espionage.html?emc=eta1

Kayla Mueller
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=141531&TM=81342.84

I'd like to mention, too, the brave, unnamed gentleman who shouted ,"This country is disgusting," at a hearing about closing Guantanamo earlier this week.
http://apr.org/post/senate-hearing-learns-no-clear-plan-close-guantanamo

Where will it end?

Denis Neville said...

Nice observations by Pearl and Patricia.

Also note the irony of our drone president’s comments on the barbarism of ISIS at the recent prayer breakfast:

“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

While omitting the sins of American exceptionalism.

And the easily predictable “Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response” to Obama.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/the-foolish-historically-illiterate-incredible-response-to-obamas-prayer-breakfast-speech/385246/

Bill Moyers reminds us that brutality is never far away, “The Fiery Cage and the Lynching Tree,”

http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/05/isis-brutality-burning-lynching/

The Iraqi man burned alive, “The War Photo No One Would Publish,”

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/

Victor Klemperer and Kurt Vonnegut’s descriptions of firebombing of Dresden during WW2.

The list could go on and on …

I haven’t slept well this week … memories … of watching MedeVac planes arriving daily from Vietnam at Kelly AFB in San Antonio, transferring burn victims to the Brook Army Burn Center, while awaiting my transfer to Germany … a high school classmate who burned to death in an armored personnel carrier in Vietnam … another classmate who was horribly burned, but survived, in a house fire … my brief experience (I didn’t last long; I was not that special kind of person it takes) in a burn unit …

And, yes, as Bill Moyers said:

“Yes, it was hard to get back to sleep the night we heard the news of the Jordanian pilot's horrendous end. ISIS be damned! I thought. But with the next breath I could only think that our own barbarians did not have to wait at any gate. They were insiders. Home grown. Godly. Our neighbors, friends, and kin. People like us.”

annenigma said...

@Denis

Funny how the Capitalists blame the Christians instead of their own religion - worship of Money for power and glory.

It is barbaric for ISIS to burn someone alive in a cage. Why don't they do it the more civilized way like us? We incinerate them instantly from a drone that's remote-piloted from a video console thousands of miles away. It's a two-fer: they'll be beheaded at the same time! Actually, all that's left is tissue shreds and body fluids.

Or drop a couple nuclear bombs on a city instead of a military target so they can deliberately burn alive tens of thousands of civilians, women and children alike, not even pretending they are simply collateral damage. Oh, and give those bombs names - Little Boy and Fat Boy.

@ Patrica M

'Where will it end?' Speaking as a Taoist, I can hardly put it into words except to say that I believe The Way will prevail.

Patricia M. said...

@Denis -
Don't we all miss an intelligent orator like Martin Luther King. And, of course, what would it be like with a Franklin Delano Roosevelt . . . .

@ annenigma -
You said it nicely - and wisely. Thank you.