But if truth be told, Brooks is only a sickly pale guppy compared to the ravenous shark named CNN. Brooks only burbles out two columns a week when he isn't adopting an avuncular persona for folksy "debates" on PBS with Mark Shields. CNN, on the other hand, has been manically churning the fetid propaganda waters non-stop, resulting in a bloody maelstrom in which fear begets more fear, profits beget more profits.
As Farron Cousins of Ring of Fire explains, it's all about the ratings. Like any shark worth its endless rows of teeth, CNN is nothing if not a bona fide eating machine:
Cousins didn't need to tell me to stop watching CNN. (Except for the first GOP debate, I've never watched Fox.) I shut CNN off of my own volition a week ago because the war porn made me feel so sickly. MSNBC is a little better, because it does occasionally interrupt the war porn to cover other news. I have no idea how CNN will tear itself away from the bombs and death when it hosts the next Republican debate. On second thought, what is a Republican debate but bombs and death, xenophobia and paranoia? What are Donald Trump and Marco Rubio but political porn stars?
What is CNN but a subsidiary of the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA and the State Department? Thanks to what the late Sheldon Wolin called Inverted Totalitarianism, the USA doesn't need the equivalent of a state-owned Pravda, because the government and the corporate media are essentially one and the same outfit. CNN feeds the war machine, and the war machine feeds CNN. It's a totally voluntary, totally corrupt arrangement.
They're all doing their military Keynesian part: Pentagon spending fuels CNN's profits, and CNN's propaganda begets more military profits, and more military profits beget more weapons manufacturing and more weapons sales beget more war and death and more catastrophes beget more fear and the overcoming of those sickly inhibitions.
From Reuters (h/t Robert Sadin):
The U.S. government is working hard to ensure quicker processing of U.S. foreign arms sales, which surged 36 percent to $46.6 billion in fiscal 2015 and look set to remain strong in coming years, a top Pentagon official said.
"Projections are still strong," Vice Admiral Joe Rixey, who heads the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), told Reuters in an interview late on Monday.
He said the agency was trying to sort out the impact of a much stronger-than-expected fourth quarter as it finalized its forecast for arms sales in fiscal 2016, which began Oct. 1.
The fight against Islamic State militants and other armed conflicts around the globe were fueling demand for U.S. missile defense equipment, helicopters and munitions, Rixey said, a shift from 10 years ago when the focus was on fighter jets.
"It's worldwide. The demand signal is coming in Europe, in the Pacific and in Centcom," he said, referring to the U.S. Central Command region, which includes the Middle East and Afghanistan.CNN is also forecast to enjoy a stronger than expected fourth quarter, what with all that extra ad revenue generated by all those excess military profits and excess Trumpian xenophobia. People always switch on the boob tube whenever they're frightened to death, and then the boob tube makes sure that they become even more frightened to death. The endless propaganda feedback loop is as perpetual as war itself.
The civil rights anthem of the Military-Industrial Complex: We Shall Overcome.... your sickly inhibitions.
So how about we overcome their propaganda and boycott the war profiteers as a form of protest? Don't spend money on any of the products and services you've seen advertised on CNN before you shut it off. These include most pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter pain killers, breakfast cereals, sugar and corn and toxic cleaning products which necessitate the pharmaceuticals, and anything manufactured by Koch Industries.
Let's give peace a chance. Let's also give them a piece of our minds as we take a million tiny but painful Piranha-like bites out of their tender, overstuffed shark-flesh.
