AMERICAN BRAINWASH

ALEX COCKBURN—The narcotizing, humorless properties of the ‘MacNeil/Lehrer Report,’ familiar to anyone who has felt fatigue creep over him at 7:40 Eastern time, are crucial to the show. Tedium is of the essence, since the all-but- conscious design of the program is to project vacuous dithering (‘And now, for another view of Hitler …’) into the mind of the viewers, until they are properly convinced that there is not one answer to ‘the problem,’ but two or even three, and that since two answers are no better than none, they might as well not bother with the problem at all.

RENEE PARSONS—The question remains whether any amount of ‘reform’ can make the FISA Court acceptable from a Constitutional perspective or whether continued existence of the Court is necessary given its unabashed record of facilitating near-unanimous approvals to conduct surveillance, in other words, the Court is needed for the mindless approval of surveillance applications to create the false impression for a gullible public that there is an independent Constitutionally-valid process at work.

MoA—The U.S. is likely to already have a significant number of cases but a lack of testing capacity has made any realistic estimate impossible. Chinese scientists had published the genome sequence of the virus on January 12 and, based on it, developed test kits within a few days. The U.S. Center of Disease Control and Prevention also developed a test kit but had problems with its first version and its wider distribution. More than a month later it is still not ready for the foreseeable need.

PHILIP GIRALDI—The Times article was written by David Sanger, the paper’s venerable national security correspondent. He is reliably wedded to Establishment views of the Russian threat, as is his newspaper, and strikes rock bottom in his assessment when he cites none other than “Victoria Nuland, who in a long diplomatic career had served both Republican and Democratic administrations, and had her phone calls intercepted and broadcast by Russian intelligence services.”

JIM KAVANAGH—That would be the same Mike Bloomberg who has “never been in favor of raising the minimum wage,” is in favor of cutting social Security and Medicare, and thinks the financial crisis was caused by a liberal Congress forcing banks to end redlining. That would be the Mike Bloomberg who is the ninth richest person in the world, with more wealth than 125 million of his fellow citizens.