EYE ON THE MEDIA Most anglophone liberals are concentrated in the upper 10% of the population; the comfortably affluent, albeit not quite the filthy rich, who inhabit a more rarified atmosphere in the 0.0001% of the population and actually run the show by virtue of extreme acummulation of private property. So let's call these liberals as some sociologists do, the "upper middle class", which is also the slice of society doing the actual managing of the 0.0001% properties, from staffing the nation's media and political class to colleges and other centers of political opinion, down to foundations, NGOs, and inevitably also the billionaires' assets throughout the corporate flora. These are people who often sound progressive but when push comes to shove either act or support hardcore conservative values, especially when it comes to rallying round the flag for some good cause convenient to the "consensual imperial project", like punishing Assad and the people of Syria for his imaginary human rights violations . Often priggish, their mentality tends to the schizophrenic, while their actual political ideology remains opportunistically polymorphous. Most liberals these days (like rightwingers) listen or watch only those media channels they regard as safely mirroring their viewpoints about life or which they have learned to "respect", venues like NPR, the NYTimes, PBS, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, the two dying weeklies, TIME and Newsweek, and naturally the mainstream TV networks (excepting Fox, of course). Their favorite comics are Stephen Colbert, much admired by this crowd for his tedious and unrelenting anti-Trump tirades; plus John Oliver and Bill Maher, the latter having recently completed his journey from onetime mild enfant terrible to complete shill for the status quo. Their favorite magazines, most of them solidly middlebrow, include The Atlantic, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and some pretentious journals like The Economist, plus a smattering of other titles of the same ilk. Needless to say this crowd is exasperatingly and obtusely loyal to the Clintons, not to mention Barack Obama, whom they still idiotically idolise. And they never tire of cynical russophobes like Rachel Maddow. It's also well known that this crowd is highly manipulable by Soros ops like MoveOn and Avaaz, where they normally get their "marching" notions and the ludicrous idea they constitute some sort of "Resistance" to Trumpism. This kind of misguided thinking then frequently becomes turbocharged on their favorite blog, The Daily Kos, a self-confessed adjunct to the Democratic party. Incidentally, so deranged are the optics of contemporary liberals in the age of Trump that an estimable number militate in the Neocon legion (as do almost all of their leaders like the Clintons, and their extensive mafia all over the Democrat party) without admitting or even realising it. The above defines a solidly insulated echo chamber where truth or any inconvenient fact that contradicts the central dogmas stands little chance of getting through, hell, of even reaching the liberals' outer consciousness perimeter, let alone their complacent brains. This self-inflicted isolation from truth then results, far more glaringly than among the multitudes of rightwing yahoos, in the absurdity of a mass of supposedly intelligent and well educated people behaving like ignorant zombies when it comes to contemporary realities. It is this fetid context that explains why two higly perceptive observers, Jimmy Dore and David Masciotra, have now zeroed in on this new-fangled liberal gushing over the plutocracy's security apparatus, the FBI and the CIA, with all the disgust that such an idiotic shift calls for. Their eloquent analyses follow. —PG
Patrice GreanvilleA filing by Jimmy Dore—
POLL: Brainwashed Liberals Luv The CIA Most! #TheJimmyDoreShow
We have long seen signs of this imbecilic trend among NeverTrumper liberals—but now it's become an epidemic—
A filing by David Masciotra
9/11/73 in Chile: Army troops fire on the Moneda palace from a rooftop across the plaza. Note the machine gun nest being used besides regular arms. Coup courtesy of the CIA, plus associated native bourgeoisie.
"Resistance" liberals love the FBI and CIA. History says they don't love you back
After all we know about domestic spying and overseas coups, suddenly liberals are into the national-security state
DAVID MASCIOTRA • SALON
Excerpts
SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 4:00PM (UTC)
Maher’s weird and historically illiterate “tribute” to two organizations with endless résumés of human rights violations, political persecution of dissidents and overseas coups directed at democratic governments — not to mention stunning failure at the principal tasks of their mission — punctuated his declaration of gratitude for “our safety” since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The comedian and commentator then tried to dress this right-wing, jingoistic bromide in progressive drag by reminding the crowd that President Trump has “disrespected” both agencies.
“Real Time with Bill Maher” acts as a sounding board for its admittedly clever host, who can often amuse, enlighten and nauseate in the same string of sentences. His latest nonsense remark is worthy of scrutiny only because it is the most overt and odious display of a lamentable blind spot in the mainstream, Democratic revolt against the disastrous leadership of Donald Trump. Democrats in Congress, along with pundits on MSNBC and columnists for the New York Times, have made former CIA officers and directors, and veterans of the FBI — most notably the pitiful Robert Mueller — into the face of the opposition, in a seeming attempt to illustrate the enduring truth of the Rolling Stones lyric describing elections as a “choice of cancer or polio.”
Anyone with minimal sanity should agree that the United States has an imperative to excise the Trump-tumor from the White House, by whatever means necessary, But if the alternative is John Brennan, Michael Hayden, James Comey and all the subterfuge and indifference to suffering that accompanies men of their ilk, then we might as well remove the quaint notion of democracy from the executive branch of government, along with its current occupant.
Mueller, viewed by many Trump foes as the messiah of American freedom, made headlines years before his extended yawn of a report by testifying before Congress on the imminent danger of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. he played a pivotal role in selling a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, drained the U.S. treasury, and continues to poison the Iraqi environment with levels of toxicity leading to birth defects and permanent health conditions in the native population.
Hayden, the former director of both the National Security Agency and the CIA, has become a favorite critic of Trump’s irresponsible and reckless foreign policy posturing. It is almost as if liberals, including MSNBC superstars Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, have forgotten or chosen to overlook that Hayden oversaw the creation of a massive surveillance program in the NSA, argued that law enforcement officials do not require “probable cause” to search the person and property of terrorist suspects, and defended the use of torture as a means of extracting information from “enemy combatants.”
When the liberal response to the threat of fascism includes such things as war without justification, the widespread violation of civil liberties, and medieval interrogation tactics that conflict with international law, it's long past time for some introspection and re-evaluation of principles.
The war in Iraq and the national security policies of the George W. Bush administration may now strike many people as aberrant — unique products of that era, driven by extraordinary circumstances and the outsized influence of ghouls like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. But even a cursory study of the CIA and FBI's history reveals otherwise.
“9/11,” for instance, denotes an atrocity quite different in Chile. On that date in 1973, the CIA, with the encouragement of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, supported a military coup that overthrew the elected government of President Salvador Allende, a democratic socialist. The resulting regime was led by one of the world’s most vicious dictators, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Under his leadership, the Chilean junta “disappeared” more than 3,000 dissidents and journalists, and tortured at least 30,000 others for real or suspected political resistance.
The CIA orchestrated or directly sponsored similar anti-democratic campaigns in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and many other countries — in most or all cases leading to regimes supported by torture, routine human-rights violations and other police-state tactics. All of these had damaging long-term consequences, although the CIA-supported overthrow of Iran's democratic government in 1953 — leading to 26 years of repressive monarchy and then the Iranian Revolution — offers an especially dramatic example.
The late Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA analyst who became a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, popularized the term "blowback" in a series of books describing how American imperialism — especially the CIA subversion of popular movements and freely elected leaders — creates hostility toward American interests around the world, often resulting in terrorist attacks. The most significant such attack in American history, the 9/11 hijackings by Islamic fundamentalists — rhetorically manipulated by Maher to praise the CIA — is the most murderous and tragic example of blowback in action.
If the CIA functions to expand American power overseas, often through violence, the FBI is the domestic execution of the same “might makes right” principle.
The ACLU issued a 2013 report on the FBI's routine abuses of its authority in the post-9/11 era, writing:
Since 9/11, the ACLU has uncovered and documented persistent evidence of FBI abuse, including warrantless wiretapping, racial and religious profiling, biased counterterrorism training materials, politically motivated investigations, abusive detention and interrogation practices, and misuse of the No-Fly List to recruit informants.
The report also documents how the FBI has implemented a hideously autocratic set of policies meant to avoid accountability and deceive the public: The “internal suppression of whistleblowers, and often misleading testimony to Congress has effectively thwarted independent oversight of the bureau, allowing violations of the civil liberties and privacy rights of people inside of and outside of the United States to continue unabated.”
The previous high-water mark of the FBI was the notorious covert program known as COINTELPRO, in effect from 1956 to 1971. This was a set of “off the books” policies, actions and tactics aimed at suppressing political dissent in the United States, ranging from getting activists fired from their jobs to the police murder of Fred Hampton, leader of the Black Panthers in Chicago.
You can read the whole article on the original source, Salon.
Unusual times demand unusual measures. If you value Salon's original reporting and commentary, we urge you to support it — by supporting our writers directly. Right here, right now, you can make a financial contribution to help make David Masciotra's work possible. All funds go directly to writers.
ADDENDUM
In case you think we are exaggerating
[bg_collapse view="button-orange" color="#4a4949" expand_text="CLICK TO VIEW— Bill Maher: The Strange Case of the Liberal Who Loved the CIA" collapse_text="Show Less" ]
Talk show host Bill Maher: Intelligence agencies “our last line of defense”
By David Walsh
22 February 2017
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n an extraordinarily foul outburst February 17, Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” termed American intelligence agencies “our last line of defense” against the allegedly pro-Russian Donald Trump and referred approvingly to Egypt and Turkey as countries where similar agencies had intervened against a “crazy” dictator. Maher has been pathological on the subject of supposed Russian interference in the US elections since the issue first arose. On July 27, 2016, in response to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails and unsubstantiated claims that Russian agents seeking to tip the election in Trump’s favor were behind the action, Maher described Trump (who was semi-jokingly urging that Russian secret services hack Hillary Clinton’s missing emails) as “the voice of treason.”
Maher went on last July: “He’s always taking Russia’s side. Plainly, Trump is a Russian agent. I mean, I don’t know it for a fact, but a lot of people are saying it . … Oh yes, Donald Trump: the spy who loved himself.”
One month ago, on Inauguration Day, in his opening monologue, Maher observed, “It really happened, we Americans have a new leader … Vladimir Putin—and also this guy Trump took an oath today.”
One of his guests January 20, Keith Olbermann, asserted, “We were invaded, is what it boils down to. Just because there was not blood on the streets. If the Russians had come in with Cossacks and put him [Trump] in, I think we would have had a different kind of reaction. … And we’re now only debating at this point, after the story in the New York Times, how much the Russians decided our election.”
Maher, who built a reputation for himself as an iconoclast during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequently under George W. Bush, has claimed at various times to be a “liberal,” a “libertarian” and a “progressive, a sane person.” As we have noted previously: “His sneering, cynical, ‘anti-establishment’ posturing is aimed at taking in a certain section of those, especially among the young, disaffected with official politics and orienting them in quite a reactionary direction. His ‘iconoclasm’ has never gone farther than skin deep.”
Maher opened his February 17 program by asserting, in his monologue, that there was an “unprecedented state of crisis in this country” and that the resignation of Michael T. Flynn as national security adviser, because of discussions with Russian officials, was “the most serious political scandal we’ve ever had in the United States.” He described Donald Trump as a “mental patient who thinks he’s Hitler.”
In the panel discussion portion of the program, Maher argued that “our country’s hanging by a thread” and that Trump was guilty of “the crime of treason, the crime is colluding with Russia to fix an American election.”
One of his guests, Malcolm Nance, who described himself as having formerly worked for US Naval Intelligence and the NSA, as well as having been “loaned to other people” (presumably, the CIA), claimed that the 2016 was “the first time that a president was elected with the assistance of a foreign intelligence agency [i.e., Russia’s].” Nance did not provide the slightest evidence for his allegation, and, indeed, some time later, Maher was obliged to admit, “We don’t have the proof of that” [Russian involvement], but that did not prevent either man from making the wildest statements.
Maher went on to suggest that “the [US] intelligence agencies are crying out, ‘We don’t want to do a coup …’” In the most startling part of his comments, Maher argued that President John F. Kennedy had been killed in 1963 by US intelligence, or at least “that was one theory,” because of his philandering. He was having sex with “East German spies and mafia couriers” and the intelligence outfits “couldn’t trust him … [They said to themselves] ‘He is too much of a danger to America.’”
Maher must rank as one of the first “progressives” to put a positive spin on the alleged CIA involvement in Kennedy’s assassination!
He continued, “I feel like that’s where the intelligence agencies are now [in relation to Trump] … Now, they should not be violent, don’t get me wrong. But they are saying through these leaks, ‘This man cannot be president.’”
Nance, a fanatical anticommunist and the author of The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election, then chimed in: “And you know why they’re saying that? Because what we have is a situation here where the person they would have to report to, the absolute pinnacle, the commander-in-chief, is a person who himself cannot be reported to. What they’re doing is they’re reporting and they’re taking it above his head to the ultimate commander-in-chief, which is the American people. This is an act of patriotism.”
Maher went on: “America is now in this place where we have watched other countries [which] we have had our nose up about—Egypt and Turkey—places where we thought, ‘Oh, you know, the dictator is crazy, so the intelligence services, that’s not really the best option … oh, wait, it is the best option.’ They’re like our last line of defense now.”
The HBO talk show host was presumably referring to the 2013 military takeover in Egypt, which brought to power the brutal and hated dictatorship of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the failed, US-backed coup in Turkey in 2016 against the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Maher is identifying himself with murderous, right-wing forces.
Maher then noted that Trump was planning to appoint Steven Feinberg “to oversee the intelligence. It looks like a purge in the making so that he can take over. … Can Trump put his people in charge of the intelligence agencies? Because then we have no line of defense between the total coup.” The host plaintively asked later, “Where are the patriots?” apparently suggesting that such “patriots” should somehow or other deal with Trump.
Maher’s demented ranting points to several interrelated processes. First of all, there is the sharp turn to the right by all sections of the American political and media establishment, including its “gadfly,” late-night comic contingent. The latter is made up of wealthy, conservative people committed to the defense of the existing social order. They do not have a single ounce of genuinely democratic sentiment among them and have only contempt for the mass of the American and global population. The notion of a CIA-military coup in the US, with its terrible consequences, does not disturb Maher’s sleep in the least. On the contrary, he is actively promoting such an operation. He obviously does not expect to lose his job or his income under a CIA-run junta.
Concretely, figures such as Maher are frightened by the growth of social opposition to capitalism, accelerated by Trump’s right-wing policies, and are desperately seeking to divert it along reactionary lines, in this case the drive for a confrontation with Russia. Maher, an anticommunist and Islamophobe himself, helped create the atmosphere that made Trump’s election possible. Despite his violent, abusive rhetoric, the comic’s differences with the new president—like those of the entire Democratic Party orbit—are purely tactical.
That the talk show host is promoting the American intelligence apparatus, the perpetrator of countless crimes against various populations around the world, resulting in the deaths of millions, to an audience of primarily young people is an unpardonable political and ideological crime. In this manner, Maher is acting as a facilitator of authoritarianism and dictatorship.
(Dave Walsh is a cultural critic for Marxian publication wsws.org.)
This wacko imperialist opinion was received with great appreciation by Maher's Pavlovian audience of ignoramus sycophants.
Bill Maher Promotes US-Led Coup In Venezuela In ‘Unhinged Colonial Tirade’
Written by Ann BrownFeb 07, 2019
Published on Moguldom Nation
[dropcap]V[/dropcap]enezuela is in chaos with 35-year-old opposition leader Juan Guaidó recently appointing himself interim president after declaring the Nicolas Maduro presidency illegitimate.
The U.S., Canada, and other regional countries supported
Guaidó’s claim. There have been protests, starvation and deaths with no end in sight.
What should the U.S. do?
During a Jan. 25 interview with ultra-conservative pundit Ann Coulter, pro-war liberal pundit Bill Mahersaid he endorsed the U.S.-led right-wing coup in Venezuela.
Maher even backed the Russiagate conspiracy that Trump “is working with a foreign adversary.” He claimed “the president is a traitor who is in their camp.”
Maher pointed to the ongoing coup in Venezuela, where the U.S. and its right-wing allies are trying to overthrow the leftist government of Maduro and replace him with an unelected opposition leader who hopes to implement “neoliberal capitalist policies and privatize the oil-rich country’s state assets,” The Grayzone Project reported.
Maher said, “OK, they have a guy, an opposition leader who finally stood up, and we are backing him. And Russia warned us to back off because they’re backing the dictator. This was the Monroe Doctrine! This is our backyard! And Russia is now telling us to back off of what goes on in Venezuela, because they know they can? Because they’re so emboldened? That doesn’t bother you? You’re the patriot?”
In Venezuela, senior leaders claim Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and the CIA are plotting to oust Maduro.
“With their country descending into crisis, Foreign Minister Samuel Moncada and Carlos Ron, the chargé d’affaires of the Embassy of Venezuela, accused Rubio and CIA Director Mike Pompeo of secretly conspiring against Caracas so that Washington can install new leaders amenable to U.S. interests,” the Miami Herald reported.
“What this group is trying to do with Venezuela is basically divide the government, recognize other leaders and foment a conflict with the Venezuelans,” Ron told reporters in DC. “This is absolutely unacceptable.”
Venezuelan officials, including interim Ambassador to the Organization of American States Carmen Velasquez spoke with reporters in DC, criticizing U.S. threats of sanctions targeting Venezuelan oil if the vote isn’t canceled.
“There is a secret operation by the Central Intelligence Agency to split up a democratically elected government,” Moncada said.
The CIA declined to comment.
[/bg_collapse]Wow. Cruise missile liberal Bill Maher went full-on neocolonialist in his latest interview with white-nationalist Ann Coulter:
Maher praised the US-backed right-wing coup in Venezuela and declared "This is our backyard!", citing the imperialist Monroe Doctrine of 1823 pic.twitter.com/7iLFU5nwQp— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 26, 2019
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