Start The Pools ... How Soon McChrystal Becomes A Faux News Analyst?

Take a few days off, and, oh boy, all kinds of things hitting the fan ...

Reading Michael Hastings' 'The Runaway General', it hard to tell if it is a good piece of journalism, or fiction, perhaps a character synopsis for some new HBO mini-series in the offing, about a cock-waving, muscle-headed military commander..

I mean, if General Stanley A. McChrystal were cast in 'Apocalypse Now', while Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore was blabbering about "I love the smell of napalm in the morning .... The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like ...victory ...", the camera would have to pan, to McChrystal, sitting on the beach, eating napalm out his helmet, and muttering what a candy-ass Kilgore was.



Go read 'The Runaway General', for, as you do, throughout, despite all the confidence, bravado and over-the-top machoism of McChrystal, it says over, and over, of how fucked we are in Afghanistan

It is said that he will be going to his meeting with Obama today, resignation letter in-hand, and Obama is going to have to accept it (if it hasn't already been demanded), as part of the show of not being a pansy, and letting a tin-horn commander, and the Pentagon, walk all over him.



No rearview mirrors in the room today.

So, boys and girls, should McChrystal walk out of the Oval Office today, a retired muscle-headed, cock-waving, former military commander, how soon before he beelines it to Faux News, to add fresh meat to their propaganda machine?

Start cutting up the office pool squares ....


Bonus Links

Alex Pareene: Why did Gen. McChrystal talk to Rolling Stone?

C.J. Chivers: General Faces Unease Among His Own Troops, Too

Spencer Ackerman: Biden Probably Wants to Renew His Rolling Stone Subscription

Doris Kearns Goodwin: What Would Lincoln Do?

Yves Smith: Afghanistan: Pentagon Payments to Warlords Undermine Central Government

Retro Garlic: Gates vs. Iron Man

The other day we posted "Robert Gates Is In The House!", for his address taking on, and shooting an arrow across the bow of, the Military-Industrial Complex.



Yesterday, Robert Farley and Davida H. Isaacs, over on The American Prospect, put up an amusing, and informative, post, relating to the colossally-large elephant in the room;

The Stark Reality of Defense Contracting ...A summer blockbuster tackles disputes endemic to the military-industrial complex

In Iron Man 2, billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) risks billion-dollar pieces of equipment to impress guests at a birthday party -- a big mistake for a defense contractor. After all, Stark's reckless debauchery provides the perfect pretext for the U.S. government to take away his Iron Man suit. Explosions, tattoos, and Scarlett Johansson notwithstanding, the disputes between Tony Stark and his antagonists revolve around ownership of the rights to the Iron Man technology. Iron Man 2 is the most expensive movie ever made about an intellectual property dispute.

[snip]

In the United States, inventors are supposed to profit from their creations, as emphasized in the original comics. But Iron Man 2 takes a different tack. While trying to fend off Vanko, Stark is pressured by the U.S. government to give up the secrets of the Iron Man suit. After Stark refuses a senator's demand that he relinquish his body-armor technology, the government forcibly takes it from him, only to turn it over to a competitor that then uses the technology to fulfill its own defense contract. Consciously or no, this echoes the real world; the United States government can take such actions with almost total legal impunity.



These inventors theoretically have their own superpower at their disposal: the Fifth Amendment's "Takings Clause," which requires compensation for government appropriation. But it has one weakness: the military and state secrets privilege, which has been invoked with increasing frequency in the past 25 years. Perhaps most notably, it has been used to prevent suspected terrorists from obtaining access to incriminating information. Less well known is the role it has played in suppressing intellectual-property owners' attempts to recover compensation for government use of their innovations.

[snip]

Stark didn't need a monetary incentive to develop his technology. And presumably Stark, either individually or through his company, retained sufficient political pull to obtain compensation for that stolen technology without having to rely on the Takings Clause. Of course, he's just a fictional comic book hero. But as audiences watch Senate efforts to persuade Tony Stark to relinquish Iron Man technology to the U.S. Government, they should keep in mind that Stark's greatest power might not be his full-body armor but instead his company's political connections.

Suit up there, Mr. Gates ...

Or, call in the cavalry!

Retro Garlic: Cirque de Military Analysts ... Pulitzer Prize Winner!

If we want to go Retro, in a STICKS-NIX-HICK-PIX way, we could have titled this as;

Propagandists Patter Produces Pulitzer

You can remember, just going back a year, or two, ago, when the Pentagon sprouted a cottage industry of dusting off, and sprucing up, their retired Generals, and such, putting them through vigorous training, to just stick to the Bush Grindhouse Talking Points, and then pointed them to every news, and cable news, studio, to go out and sell the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, right?

And, those news networks, all of them, understood the wink-and-nod, giving those retired Generals, and such, titled, in reverence, as "Military Analysts", almost as much airtime as Pat Buchanan, even after it was brought to their attention that they were compromised, and propagandists, well, they weren't going to stand in the way of an army of old-times making a few bucks.

They had screens to fill, and endless airtime to keep churning out the Bush Grindhouse Talking Points, and who better to have beaming out of the nation's boob tubes, than a bunch of guys with a lot of ribbons on their chests and scrambled eggs on their epaulets, tossing around Militaryspeak, and keeping the morale of the country in full, technicolor, high-definition, jingoistic, flag-waving glory.



Well, pay day came this week.

But not for the propagandists, and, not for the networks.

It came to the investigative reporter, from the New York Times, who blew the cover off on this sweetheart sham-of-a-scam.

From Glenn Greenwald's "The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV";

The New York Times' David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow's exposés:

Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

Jamison Foser, over on MediaMatters, asked (almost rhetorically), "Barstow wins Pulitzer for military analysts story; will networks notice?"

Greenwald details that answer, as does dday, over on Hullabaloo, in "See No Pulitzer, Hear No Pulitzer, Speak No Pulitzer";

Indeed, NBC and CNN's reporting on the Pulitzer winners carefully avoided any mention of Barstow's story. NBC even ran a separate piece last night using one of the "military analysts" of the type in the Pentagon pundits investigation. As Glennzilla asks, "Has there ever been another Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for investigative reporting never to be mentioned on major television -- let alone one that was twice featured as the lead story on the front page of The New York Times?"

Did I expect any different? No. But the parallel structure of the news these days - where the conversation in one corner bears absolutely no resemblance to the conversation in the other - is quite striking.

Oh yeah, here are The Retro Parts;

Empty Suits ... “I felt we’d been hosed" ...

Cirque de Military Analysts

Today's Must Read - The Military-Media Dog-and-Pony Show

Oh, and one more thing ...

Congratulations David Barstow!

Today's Must Read - The Military-Media Dog-and-Pony Show

Actually, it's not fair to title it in this manner - it disparages dogs and ponies quite unfairly.

And, you'd likely see in the MSM, a story about a green puppy, before you see them cover the Pentagon bag-job of the contingent of military analyst puppets ...

Opps ... It looks like the green puppy story wins.

It is beyond outrageous that the Bush Grindhouse, and their Orwellian gang of thugs actually instituted this program, but that the media in this country marched in lock-step with it ... We can only hope that, when it comes time for these nitwit networks to renew their FCC licenses, this gets brought up and, hopefully, penalties result from it (like taking away their license would be a good start)

And just to add a little extra layer of unbelievability to it, Glenn Greenwald, yesterday, in his "How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon's own words" laid out just how "in-your-face", SOP, nonchalant they went about doing it.

On the question of whether the Pentagon maintained an illegal covert domestic propaganda program -- and on the broader question of whether the American media's political coverage is largely shaped and controlled by the U.S. Government -- I don't believe it's possible to obtain more conclusive evidence than this:

So the Pentagon would maintain a team of "military analysts" who reliably "carry their water" -- yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access -- even before responding to the press -- only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the "less reliably friendly" ones -- frozen out by the Pentagon -- would be "weeded out" by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was "their bread and butter." These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters -- and to do so almost always unchallenged -- but also even to shape and mold the networks' coverage choices.

Read the whole piece, as it contains copies of emails where they discuss this criminal action like they were discussing the days' weather.

But Wait, There's More!

And related to this is something that Barack Obama needs to weave into his stump speeches, for it captures the essence of the Bush Grindhouse most perfectly.

There was a document dump related this story, and it it, in one of the emails, TPM's Josh Marshall gets tagged by the Pentagon phonies as being a "Bush-bashing, uber-liberal"

Spencer Ackerman, writing on Think Progress, weighed in, defending Marshall.

And Ackerman pens the above-referenced recommendation for Obama;

Welcome to the next four years. These people have plunged the country into two failing/failed wars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. (Also, they pulled off a housing crisis and a healthcare crisis and an environmental crisis and when an entire city drowned the administration left the black people to die.) There’s no alibi: when conservatism had its chance to govern, this is what it yielded. If I was one of them, I’d bitch about Rajiv Chandrasekaran or Jeremiah Wright or whatever was necessary to distract people from what I did when I had the chance to do it. Get ready for years and years and years of this puerile and tiresome nonsense.

Nice to see the wisdom of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid keeping certain things "off the table"

But there is still time ...


Bonus Links

NYT: How the Pentagon Spread Its Message

Ron Beasley: Quote of the Day +

Brave New Films: What's Wrong with a Little PsyOps?

Think Progress: Only Two News Networks Willing To Explain Their Role In Pentagon Propaganda Program

Cirque de Military Analysts

Cirque de Military Analysts

Back in the early 1980's, during my brief period of performing stand-up comedy, we are at a Open Mike Night, at The Comedy Store, up on Sunset Boulevard, in Hollywood, CA.

A young ventriloquist got his time on stage and up he went, with his dummy, taking a moment to move the stool and get himself situated - and placing the dummy in front of the microphone.

A small wave of titters and laughs went about the room, believing, as one could easily at the moment, that this was part of the routine ... The ventriloquist began his set, barely audible for the packed room and soon, the small titters and laughs stopped ...After a few more moments, it became clear, that the ventriloquist was keeping the dummy in front of the microphone.

Some in the crowd began shouting at him, telling him, quite directly, to move the microphone, to use the microphone ...He continued, through the seemingly never-ending five-minutes without moving the dummy away from the microphone

To be kind, it wasn't part of the act.

Not totally unlike the blockbuster news broken last night by the NYT, with the Cirque de Military Analysts being mouthpieces for the Pentagon and Bush Grindhouse.

Dummies, up in front of the microphone, pouring out the words of their masters.

We riffed on this late last evening and, in the light of day, rereading the article, as well as all the blowback out on the WWW and Blogosphere, it leaves a more disgusting aftertaste.

While we, and others touched on it, it really is colossal, that the overarching goal of the Bush Grindhouse, and the likes to Torie Clarke and Rumsfeld, wasn't that welfare of the soldiers being sent into this blunder (or the lives of the innocent Iraqi citizens), but whether or not they could control the message, control the media.

That was what was most paramount.

Hell, they planned (and executed) on which military man would speak on which network, and give this message or that message, better than anything they planned on the ground in Iraq.

They were more upset of a General speaking out-of-turn, speaking truth, than whether-or-not our soldiers were safe, that they had the proper training, equipment and armor.

It was Wag The Dog, Director's Cut!

While this is wrong on so many levels, (including the NYT publishing this, perhaps as a Mea Culpa, being they were, perhaps, the biggest cheerleader as to WMD's and going into Iraq), that retired military people engaged in this, with total disregard, abdicating, even, in retirement, the moral equivalent, of protecting their soldiers.

Much like a bevy of other Bush Cronies, they simply were looking to cash-in on it.

Larisa Alexandrovna, on her blog At-Largely, has a good post, in which she offers clear vision;

"An excellent article in the NYT today illustrates our continued march toward the marriage of corporate and state interests, otherwise known as fascism ..."

As does Greg Mitchell, out on the HuffPo;

"But to get you started, a few points to keep in mind:

-- The article has at least three tracks: One, the Pentagon deploying the analysts (some 75 in number) and the TV outlets happy to run with them; two, the analysts' further conflict-of-interest in being tied to defense contractors with billions of dollars invested in the war effort; three, the complete lack of interest by the TV outlets in either of the first two connections, or ignoring what they did know. In fact, the networks raised no objections to the Pentagon paying for trips by the analysts.

-- The effort began in "selling the war" -- going where even Judy Miller feared to tread -- and there are some startling admissions by some team members that they knew they were being sold a fairy tale on WMD, but went along with it anyway. The moral bankruptcy is truly disgusting."

And Libby, over on Newshoggers speaks for many;

No surprises here. Simply more proof that we have more to fear from our own government than we do from terrorists.

Haven't seen or heard the three major candidates weigh in on this yet.

And, likely, for at least two of them - Hillary and Obama - we won't hear anything, being it's two-days out from PA voting (and if they have the balls to call this repugnant, or such, Christ, make sure they're wearing a Flag Lapel Pin when the do it ... We don't want to further stress out Nash McCabe).


Some More Links

Praire Weather: "We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you... "

Steve Benen: Puppets of the Defense Department

Mustang Bobby/Shakesville: The Puppetry of the Pentagon

Think Progress: Pentagon uses military analysts as ‘puppets’ to push talking points


"I'm sorry, can you lie a little louder"