Anti-Integrity

     Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night did a story about net neutrality, how the three Republicans on the FCC Board of five bigwigs voted recently to kill it, a move designed to limit small time internet users while benefitting corporations, like Comcast, Maddow's employer.
     Maddow didn't mention Comcast.  Unlike a villain in The Lord of the Rings, she doesn't seem proud to work for the Dark Lord.  The less said about her capitalist overlord the better.  The less said about the war machine supported by her overlord the better, for her.  She makes many thousands of dollars per day not dwelling upon stories relevant to American lives.  Every time I tune in to her primetime show (to check out its monotonous lousiness) I don't hear her speaking about the noxious Republican tax bill--which she and her overlord benefit from--nor do I hear her condemning U.S. assistance to Saudi Arabia as the latter country annihilates Yemenis.
     She does speak excessively about Russia, a country made out to be our primary adversary, when the evidence points to big money Wall Street, unlimited money in politics, and warmongering interests as ordinary Americans' chief enemies.
     Predictably, Maddow last night began her story about net neutrality by not taking a position on it.  The ruination of free use of the internet for ordinary Americans doesn't seem to irk her emotions.  She shifted her story quickly to the thousands of comments sent to government agencies before the FCC made its decision.  Many of the comments seem to derive from Russia, or have been made to seem so.  They often have a curious halving quality, half for net neutrality, half against.  Some of the comments are from dead people whose identities have been borrowed.  It's similar to elections in this country, when data gets manipulated by unseen hands in favor of one candidate over another.
     Maddow's conclusion amounted to the Russians are at it again.  But she blamed the Trump Administration, too, for its alleged coziness with the Russian government.  The someone in America messing with comments about the FCC's impending decision about net neutrality must, Maddow insisted, be connected with Trump's operations, which, according to the MSNBC narrative (in full compliance with numerous U.S. intelligence professionals offering opinions on the channel) are in line with Moscow.
     In response to Maddow's what is going on? look in her eyebrows I can only say, given the "evidence" offered in her story, that the massive number of phony comments, so easily deciphered as to origin, related to the FCC's impending decision was part of a U.S. intelligence operation meant to smear Russia, a habit indulged in during the last year and several months by U.S. intelligence operatives, former and current, appearing as pundits on CNN and MSNBC.  Maddow, like her colleague Chris Hayes, has turned her show from a useful purveyor of information with a Progressive slant to a hackneyed propaganda broadcast in service to her corporate overlord.  Comcast, owner of MSNBC, participates in the corporate/military industrial/congressional/entertainment complex that perpetuates war and income inequality, a goal achieved over the last thirty-six years by the wealthy against the interests of their serfs, us.
     What makes Maddow so disgusting is that she used to be somebody true and honest, caring for ordinary people, but something happened--her salary went way up, turning her into a rich slave doing the bidding of the elites ruining this planet.  Her integrity wasn't strong enough, she couldn't say no to the money or the TV platform, which just got shittier and shittier the more she focused on Russia (a story meaning nothing to ordinary people struggling economically).  In obsessing on Russia, she did manage to divert attention away from important things, like health care, perpetual war, police violence against civilians, the need for a national minimum wage increase, gun violence, the opioid epidemic, the obscenity of the recent tax bill, Trump's anti-environmental policies, income inequality, the lowering of life expectancy in America, Flint's continuing water problems, the endless misery of Puerto Ricans due to U.S. government neglect.
     None of the above-mentioned serious problems degrading American lives have anything to do with the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, but are all specifically American problems not being dealt with by our greedy and immoral leaders, those propped up by the lack of transparency afforded them whenever journalists like Maddow don't expose their inadequacies and destructive actions but rather focus attention, as she has spent the past year doing, on fevered speculations about Trump and Russia.
     The creation of new enemies is an old practice by governments.  World War Two had its Nazis and Japanese.  Once Germany and Japan were defeated, post-war America under Harry Truman looked to demonize the Soviet Union and Communism generally, with the People's Republic of China added to the list.  Once the Cold War ended, terrorism became the new enemy; an absurdity since going to war against a tactic makes no sense, especially when the United States itself practices and supports terrorism covertly and overtly, relying on the news media to frame our violence against innocents in bland, gutless ways.
     The Global War on Terror, our big conflict of this century, is now sixteen years old.  Russia as an enemy was thought up at the right time to revitalize at least some interest in news and intelligence circles, providing a new bugbear to link with a new villain, the sick fuck clown Donald Trump, a man whose real ties to Russia could actually be related to owing lots of money to oligarchs, rather than alleged collusion with Putin to steal the 2016 election.  That election, like those in 2000 and 2004, has suspicious qualities pointing to voter purges that tilted certain key districts to Trump.  If this is the case, nefarious Republicans in America didn't need Putin to subvert democracy anymore than did Republican government officials in Florida in 2000 or in Ohio in 2004.  We don't need Russia to fuck ourselves.
     Rachel Maddow's segment on net neutrality, so lacking in information about net neutrality and why it's important for our democracy, shows that serving her master's intelligence agency-provided views on America's newfound enemy Russia is more important to her than being honest about something deeply important to American freedoms.  Thus, she's a propaganda artist serving a dubious intelligence operation turned against Russia, meant, ultimately, to continue perpetual war for the benefit of arms dealers and the national security state.  Had she been a citizen of Nazi Germany she would've fit right in, a conformist preaching the necessity of war with the Soviet Union.
     She's not alone in this.  Contemporary cable news journalism is replete with examples of journalists behaving faithfully like good servants of corporatist propaganda news outlets.  Yesterday on MSNBC, anchor Stephanie Ruhle (a former Deutsche Bank employee) had a segment on the current popular unrest in Iran.  One of her guests, President of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, had it out with another guest, neoconservative warmonger and Iraq War fomenter Bill Kristol, a Fox News pundit who makes the rounds too of CNN and MSNBC, proving that all three networks want to hear the words of liars.
     After Kristol praised the Iranians' desire for freedom, Parsi countered, "With all due respect, Bill, you've been arguing to bomb Iran for so long so I don't know if you're really respecting the Iranian people.  You've been advocating killing Iranians.  I don't think you or the Trump Administration [Trump tweeted support for the protestors] have the credibility to now say that you care for the Iranian people."
     Gasp.  Kristol got more heated than I've ever seen him get.  He yelled.  He doesn't like being called a warmonger, doesn't like it when his own viewpoints, as expressed extensively in his Weekly Standard publication, get thrown back at his sneering face, which means he really isn't interested in defending some of his own ideas, making him a despicable coward who won't stand up for what he believes whenever someone challenges him authoritatively; in other words, a slave to power.
     Stephanie Ruhle, employee of a war-promoting news network, defended Kristol frantically, "Bill Kristol is not advocating killing anyone!  Let's make that very clear!"
     Parsi replied calmly, in nice contrast to Kristol: "No, on the contrary, there's been an argument [Kristol's and others'] for taking military action against Iran, instead of having this nuclear deal that has been working."
     Ruhle offered Kristol the last word; he declined.  He knows Parsi is right about his own positions on Iran.  I looked up just one Weekly Standard article written by Kristol in 2006.  He expresses his opinion that Iran's nuclear facilities should be bombed, adding, "Why not?  Yes, there will be consequences, but they will be good ones."
     Consider, too, Kristol's propaganda role in advocating for the destruction of Iraq and the Middle East in general for the favorable benefit, supposedly, of the U.S.  His bloodthirstiness can be read in print and heard on television--that's been the case for two decades.  In spite of that, Stephanie Ruhle defended Kristol, a man who has spent much of his life advocating the mass slaughter resulting from invasive warfare, rather than defending Trita Parsi, who spoke truthfully about the warmonger on her show.
     Imagine Hermann Göring on trial at Nuremberg, his lawyer insisting stridently, "My client is not anti-Semitic!  And what's more, he did not want to bomb England!"
     Black is white, up is down, net neutrality should be understood in terms of Russia, Bill Kristol is a humanitarian.
     MSNBC journalists complain on air about Trump's gripes about "fake news," but what are we to make of a network so committed, like CNN and Fox, to not recognizing the relevance of what's real and verifiable, as opposed to indulging every day and night on speculation about Russia-oriented bullshit, with misinformation thrown in, plus omission of what's most important in truly valuable news content.  Isn't that kind of news the dream of a totalitarian state?

                                                                               Vic Neptune