PATRICE GREANVILLE
All bastions of liberalism are now bankrupt in America. For one thing, liberalism as a political position is useless in the present world, and it always fell short even when it was in its zenith of prestige, power and effectiveness. US liberals have a long record of treachery and cowardice, of rank opportunism and plain political idiocy well soaked in willful ignorance. Unsurprisingly, they furnish a lot of the Obamabot troops, and pollute the core of the Democratic party, never a truly serious reformist party anyway, let alone an instrument for necessary and audacious social change. Most mainstream liberals militate in the Democratic party of course, and the party’s top tier is crawling with them, which means that center-rightists and AIPAC-influenced liberals like Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, and John Kerry set the party’s course and loyally fill corporate/Zionist policy. In large measure, the Democrats survive because the Republicans are worse, not by much, and most certainly not in all issues: in some the Democrats are far worse, as Obama has amply demonstrated, but enough to put the fear of God in the Democratic masses who see the “lesser evil” as the logical choice of people “who understand reality.”
The liberals’ media reflect such worldview and temperament. Riddled with timidity and bourgeois values, NPR has long been a failing institution. For one thing, NPR is perennially afraid of cuts in its budget, one of the ways reactionary and corrupt political hacks control public media PBS suffers from the same affliction). Another reason is the perennial barrage from the rightwing loonies accusing NPR of being too liberal (we wish), or plain communist.
[pullquote] The world crisis is radical, it can’t be cured with liberal nostrums. Centrism can’t cure shit; it never did and it never will. And Pelosi, Feinstein, Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Obama are not the cure, they are the disease. [/pullquote]A typical plaint comes from Roger Rick who still believes there is such a thing as “unbiased journalism” and who runs a site aptly named nprsucks.com. As a rightwinger Rick probably finds fault with NPR for its mildly leftoid slant, a slant that is more visible in classical “wedge issues” like abortion, guns, racism, bourgeois feminist concerns, climate change, etc., than in political issues of power concentration, abuse of power by the reigning plutocracy, inequality, etc. As I said NPR wears a leftoid slant on its discussion of wedge issues, and it’s not even consistent about that. But In all the issues that really matter, and which define whether a society is a democracy or a plutocracy, NPR toes the establishment line unfailingly. That’s not enough for the rightwing mind. And that’s why there’s no point in trying to meet the Right’s demands. It only works as a form of appeasement provoking further demands and more Here’s Rick’s bill of attainder:
NPR distorts the truth, routinely takes sides on issues that, as a news organization, it should report about in an unbiased fashion, and — most annoying of it all — it wants to reform me, make me a better person, very much like the Communists tried to create the brave New Man.
Why do I care? I care because NPR spends federal tax dollars doing it. If you want to broadcast your views about saving the rain forest, dangers of smoking, mean House Republicans, greedy oil companies, irresponsible gun owners, same-sex marriage, or the plight of the Palestinian people, do it with your own money — not mine.
True liberals should not be cowed by such ludicrous horse manure. After all, “conservatives” and wingnuts are one inch away from full-fledged paranoid delusions, and their mean-spiritedness, narrow-mindedness and self-absorption are legendary. People who talk reverently about selfishness being a virtue are beyond salvation. Selectively ignorant, they invariably see the world upside down. This is not a matter of opinion. We can all differ in matters of opinion but none of us is entitled to our own facts, or to toss out accepted definitions when it suits our argument. Opinions issue from the very imperfect filters we have acquired to comprehend reality. Opinion is born subjective; sometimes it converges with reality and sometimes it does not. Reality is what it is. If we properly understand what a “Communist” is, then to claim Obama is a communist is beyond ludicrous; it’s so cruelly far from the truth that those who think that way are terminally ignorant or functional imbeciles.
If liberals were leftists (which they certainly are not), or if they had enough political intelligence and valor, they would quickly realize that objective truth —AKA reality—is on their side; that there’s no need to run. Reality almost always aligns with the left analysis of history. The causes the left endorses help people and nature. The causes and goals the right espouses hurt everyone. It’s been that way for a long time, way before there was a “right” and a “left” in political terminology. That holds for just about any topic you examine, from unemployment to the corrupting influence of money in politics, to US foreign policy, an area which is easy to anticipate considering the well known objectives of American power in the international arena.
The reasons for that will be clear when you examine the program above, The Takeaway, with John Hockenberry.
NPR is permeated with servile deference to government officials, and pro-imperial figures, starting in this case with Obama and his lieutenants, and Hockenberry’s program is no exception. At a time when the world is tottering on a gigantic war in the Middle East and the underbelly of Europe, he typically chooses to help fuel the flames by interviewing warmongering prostitutes like NATO’s Secretary General Rasmussen. On what planet do such people live? Doesn’t Hockenberry know what NATO really is a barely disguised instrument of Washington’s imperial designs?
It would be a lot healthier, and it would make for better journalism, if we saw less sucking up to the criminals in power, and less tacit endorsement of the status quo, less coddling to rich liberals’ pet issues (like the bourgeois feminists obsession with the corporate “glass ceiling”), and a more aggressive denunciation of the main operating lies that sustain the legitimacy of the ruling elites. It would also be dandy to see true radicals invited to balance the extremists of the right and center. Hockenberry and his ilk won’t do it, of course (just like his counterparts on the MSM) for their careers would be quickly and quietly shelved, but that is what it will take to break the Big Lie’s stranglehold on the American mind. If such a miracle did happen, I’m certain it would make NPR a real progressive outfit and not the treacherous liberaloid mess it currently is.
Patrice Greanville is founding editor of The Greanville Post.