The Cult of St. Barack (A Primer)
Yesterday's snapshot has a few asking questions. That's understandable. What took place in 2008 not only shouldn't have taken place, but it remains unexamined by many. That's no accident. While FAIR and others insist upon 'standards' for Big Media, they enforce no standards for Panhandle Media (and FAIR, itself, is the beggar media) they only created and embraced The Cult of St. Barack.
[May , 2008, Isaiah's "Sunset Campaign."]
One e-mail (I've only read 40 so far, we just got off the plane a little over an hour ago) asked about: "Go down the list of all the people who swore that Barack Obama would end the Iraq War, that US troops would no longer occupy Iraq, that US troops would be gone. They lied and then they lied again. Over and over." How was it a lie?
There are two ways.
First, there's what was always known and that is the Senate voting records. Barack Obama didn't get sworn in until 2005. So he avoided the 2002 authorization vote on Iraq (which some say approved the war and some -- such as the late Elizabeth Edwards defending her husband's vote -- insisted was calling for more time and inspections). It is a fact that in 2004, he was telling the New York Times (during the DNC convention in Boston) that he would have voted for that authorization had he been in Congress. But he wasn't there. But what you did have was how he voted once he got in. For war, war and more war. His votes were identical to Hillary's.
And yet the liars presented Hillary in the most vile and sexist terms while buffing and lapping at St. Barack. And if you need to do research, you should use links in entries. So much of what happened in 2008 was covered in "The Year of Living Hormonally" and that is named and linke to in the snapshot.
It is there that you will find out about how the record on the war was repeatedly distorted by the likes of Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) and Matthew Rothschild (The Progressive, Progressive Radio Show, etc.). You bring on a Barack supporter and let them rave and you join them in the raving and you never ask a critical question about the war or Barack's votes to support it and continue it. You bring on a Hillary (supporter, rare for them to do but they needed to 'instruct' their audiences in what was the 'wrong path' so they did from time to time) and you immediately began asking them how they could be against the Iraq War and support Hillary? Barack and Hillary had identical records when it came to voting on the Iraq War. Any journalist should have known that. Amy Goodman and Matthew Rothschild lied to advance Barack Obama and lied repeatedly. (Matthew's badgering of novelist Sara Paretsky for her support of Hillary made for especially uncomfortable listening.)
In addition, Barack's advisors weren't trashed while Hillary's were. Hillary's were mocked, laughed at, sneered at, etc. They were supposed War Hawks. Barack's own War Hawks -- including the Carr Center -- were never questioned or mentioned. The entire counter-insurgnecy movement figure heads were publicly backing Barack and that concerned no one. Despite the fact that during the days of Vietnam we damn well knew that counter-insurgency -- a war on the native population -- was wrong and illegal. But the so-called 'left' press didn't want to be bothered with it.
And, let's stay on The Progressive for just one more moment. A right-wing group had initials that formed an ugly term that can't appear in newspapers or be said on broadcast TV (at least it's not supposed to be said). Matthew Rothschild loved Hillary being called this word -- c**t -- and he loved it so much that he linked to The Weekly Standard. Grasp that, The Progressive linked to The Weekly Standard. Not only that, grasp that they did so with a heading of recommended stories. The Progressive recommended The Weekly Standard. Socialist Matthew Rothschild linked to the ultra-conservative, pro-war Weekly Standard. Ethics were trashed, belief systems sold out in order for the Cult of St. Barack to preach their gospel.
[August 3rd, 2008, Isaiah's "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels." Barack's with Cult of St. Barack members Katrina vanden Heuvel, Matthew Rothschild and Betsy Reed.]
The Cult of St. Barack pretended to still have a standard and they applied it to Hillary while giving Barack one pass after another.
Time and again. And, note, Jim's reading over my shoulder and carving out some things for Third including a paragraph that followed "no standard for Barack," so (a) refer to Third tomorrow for more on this topic and (b) if this entry is more disjointed than usal, that's why.
Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richards had real plans for leaving Iraq. Not pie in the sky, not airy statements. How real were those plans? In September 2009, there was a debate of the Dems vying for the party's presidential nomination.
You can refer to Isaiah's "Bloody War Hawks" (above), Rebecca's "craven dems and disgusting peter pace," Kat's "Obama, Edwards & Clinton okay with US trops in Iraq until 2013" and this"Iraq snapshot" for how Hillary, Barack and John Edwards refused to promise to have troops in 2013.
If Barack were the sainted hope of peace that the Beggar Media promised us, he could have taken that pledge. He refused to do so.
All of that and much more told you Barack was not serious about ending the Iraq War.
But maybe people in Beggar Media are just that stupid? I mean, there's got to be a reason that, at her age, Amy Goodman has to beg for dollars on air, right? There has to be a reason that these people are unemployable in real media, right?
So maybe they are just that stupid.
Even if they were that stupid, on March 7th, an event happens that changes everything. How you responded to that event if you were media or a commentator or gas bag determined whether you were lying or telling the truth.
As noted in that day's snapshot, the BBC was airing an interview with Samantha Power (who had quit the Barack Obama campaign that morning, the interview was taped prior to that) where Samantha Power revealed that Barack would decide what he'd do about Iraq if he got elected. But he was promising to have troops out in 16 months? Well, Samantha responds, you can't make that decision until you're in the White House and have examined all the facts.
That was a mind blowing moment.
A candidate's closest advisor had gone on camera to declare that the promise Barack was making to votes wasn't, in fact, for real.
Samantha wasn't just an advisor to Barack after he announced his run for presidency. The War Hawk (who supported the Iraq War though she tries to obscure that today) became Barack's advisor right after he got to the Senate. In fact, the entire War Hawk population of the Carr Center would claim to have Barack's ear. We covered all of this in real time here and at Third Estate Sunday Review. It was possible to cover it.
And it was possible to ignore it.
[June 22, 2008, Isaiah's "Wheel of Greed." Barack's with Cult of St. Barack members Katrina vanden Heuvel, Matthew Rothschild and John Nichols.]
When the BBC aired the interview with Samantha Power and when the US press picked up on it,that's when Beggar Media lost plausible deniability on the charge that they were deliberately lying to put Barack Obama in office and that they would apply no standards to their coverage of Barack and that they would trash their ethics and belief systems in order to whore for Barack.
We covered it in real time, check the March 7, 2008 snapshot. I'd already finished dictating most of the snapshot when Ava was handing me her cell and telling me I had to take the call. A friend in the news division of an American network was explaining what was just breaking and we immediately worked into the snapshot including a rush transcript of Samantha Power's remarks in full.
Samantha Power quit the campaign because of the BBC interview. Not due to the controversy where she had called Hillary a monster. She reviewed all the times in the last week -- in one interview after another -- where she had shot off her mouth and how each could be damaging but she concluded that the not-yet-aired BBC interview was the most damaging and she quit the campaign. She quit, she was not fired.
Her remarks that the promise on Iraq wasn't a promise should have been huge news at The Nation and The Progressive and all the others using the Iraq War to pimp Barack as the 'hero' emerged to save us all.
We didn't get that truth. What we got instead was silence or more lies.
[March 9, 2008, Isaiah's "Kamikaze Sammy" featuring Samantha Power's remark to the BBC.]
As usual, John Nichols chose to go the more lies route. Poor Samatha, he whined in more sentences in a single column than Carrie Bradshaw managed in an entire season of Sex in the City. But he never got around the BBC interview. He had plenty of time to lie and did so repeatedly; most infamously, he lied that Samantha and Hillary were great friends -- at that point the two had met twice and only twice by Samantha Power's own admission. We called it out here.
That column was nothing but lies and distraction from what may be Beggar Media's biggest liar.
In 2008, Barack's campaign was talking tough on doing away with NAFTA, remember? And then it turned out that Barack's campaign was also telling Canadian officials that this was just talk and not to worry. (That statement? It applies to every supposed stand Barack's ever taken. When you wonder why he 'caved' over and over regardless issue, it's because he never meant his words. The pattern was clear with NAFTA.) The Associated Press got ahold of documents proving the meeting took place February 8, 2008 between Canadian officials and Barack's economic advisors. Faced with Barack outright and clearly lying, what did John Nichols do?
Ava and I tackled it -- we were the only ones who did. See "TV: Goodman and Rose 'honoring' bad TV past" and, as you read of John Nichols going on Democracy Now! and insisting that it was a lie, that Hillary's campaign was the one who had met with Canadian officials, not Barack's, and that he had the explosive story and would be publishing it, ask yourself where that story is?
It. Never. Existed.
It was a lie that was tossed out to give the delusional something to hold onto until they could forget. "Oh, it was Hillary! Not our beloved Barack! Oh, I can't wait to read that story!"
[March 4, 2008, Isaiah's "Pinocchio Obama."]
The story never was written because John Nichols was lying. At the end of 2003, for those who've forgotten, John Nichols joined Amy Goodman to explain how his sources knew what was planned for the 2004 DNC convention, how Wesley Clark wasn't really running, just holding things up so that Hillary could take the nomination -- without ever running -- at the 2004 convention.
The two psychos should have been laughed off the air.
But at some point, either the left start's enforcing standards or it doesn't.
[Isaiah's "I Am The War Hawk You Have Been Waiting For" from December 1, 2009 featuring Barack and Cult of St. Barack members Alice Walker, Tom Hayden, Phyllis Bennis, John Nichols and Amy Goodman.]
Norman Solomon's fond of screaming "conspiracy" at the 9-11 Truth Movement. But it wasn't the 9-11 Truth Movement that acted unethically. It was Norman Solomon who, in February of 2008, pursued becoming a pledged delegate to the DNC convention for Barack Obama. And it was Norman Solomon who made a point to note that in his syndicated column because failure to do so would be unethical and, most importantly, lead to his column being pulled from the tiny number of newspapers that carry it. But it was also Norman Solomon who continued to go on the air on KPFK and KPFA radio as an 'independent' analyst from February to the end of June, never telling listeners that he was pledged to Obama while trashing Hillary repeatedly. That's unethical.
In July 2008, under pressure from endless phone calls, e-mails and letters, KPFA was finally forced to start identifying Norman Solomon on air as a pledged delegate for Obama. They should have been doing it all along.
If we had a functioning left, none of this would have happened. But we don't have a functioning left.
It's bad enough that The Nation magazine did not fire John Nichols for his endless lies. They hired Lie Face Melissa Harris-Lacewell who's on yet another marriage and now signs "Melissa Harris-Perry" but will forever be known as Lie Face. Lie Face did so much to help the Barack campaign -- a campaign she began working on in 2007, traveling all over to do campaign work (the state of California in the summer of 2007, for example). Yet somehow she was on Democracy Now! and The Charlie Rose Show in 2008 as an objective and impartial analyst and neither she nor the hosts ever revealed to the audience that not only she was supporting Barack Obama, she was working for the campaign.
If you're working for a campaign -- and Norman Solomon knows this, and FAIR knows this, and The Nation knows this, and, sad for Melissa, Princeton University knows this -- you're required to disclose that fact if you're going on air and commenting on the campaigns. Melissa failed to do that. And she's no longer at Princeton. Lucky for the students because she was so fond of attacking them and deriding them in the press. She's a real hate monger that one and it goes to her own self-identify and her own self-hatred.
And let's put it out there. Ava and I teased in January 2008, thinking the Whore might get honest. We just marveled over her hatred of White women, her foaming at the mouth hatred and her ridiculous statements of "sitting here in all my Blackness." See Melissa had a little personal secret as well.
The woman running from one outlet to another insisting Barack was Black and not bi-racial (he self-billed as bi-racial until he lost his first election, but never mind the facts, when have facts ever been applied to Barack), insisting that she was the authority on this and that she had spoken so the question was no more . . .
That little liar was leading her own little Imitation of Life subplot. See, the woman hating White women in public and sitting there in "all my Blackness"? That woman had a White mother. It wasn't a detail she wanted the press to know. It's difficult to present yourself as THE authentic voice of Black America, to launch the campaign to throw Tavis Smiley off The Tom Joyner Show (Tavis refused to blindly worship Barack, a crime in Melissa's eyes), if you tell the truth.
I was always so afraid that
The uptown friends would see her
Afraid one day when I was grown
That I would be her
In college town away from here
A new identity I found
-- "I'm Living In Shame," written by Berry Gordy Jr., Pam Sawyer, Frank Wilson, Henry Cosby and R. Dean Taylor, recorded by Diana Ross and the Supremes
Poor Melissa. Those consumed with self-hatred and shame never get far. And, again, she's no longer at Princeton. Poor Melissa.
From Lie Face back to the lie being exposed by Samantha Power's remarks to the BBC. There was silence from Beggar Media (though Real Media did report it). We called out the silence in "Editorial: The Whores of Indymedia" in March 2008 and among the people we called out for being silent? Tom Hayden.
Months later, July 4, 2008, Tom suddenly agreed with us writing:
The most shocking aspect of Samantha Powers' forced resignation earlier this year was not that she called Hillary Clinton a "monster" off-camera, but that she flatly stated that Obama would review his whole position on Iraq once becoming president. Again, no one in the media or rival campaigns questioned whether this assertion by Powers was true. Since Obama credited Powers with helping for months in writing his book, The Audacity of Hope, her comments on his inner thinking should have been pounced upon by the pundits.
But, of course, it had been questioned. ABC News reported on it, the Boston Globe reported on it, the Washington Post reported on it (repeatedly). Maybe Tom -- writing at the Huffington Post -- should have held his own Beggar Media accountable? But that would require honesty. And Hillary's campaign called it out in real time -- which led to them being trashed by Greg Sargent and David Corn who insisted the issue didn't matter. We covered this at Third in our reply to Tom's July 4th column (see "Letters to An Old Sell Out: Iraq").
And, honestly, Tom knew about it in real time and was confronted on it in March 2008. He chose to stay silent.
Only because Barack said a little more than "We want to end the war! And we want to end it now!" did Tom finally, months later, write about the March 2008 revelations. And he didn't have the decency to give credit to ABC News, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe or Hillary's campaign. He wanted you to believe that no one had covered it. It was covered and those covering it were attacked for covering it.
So that's why they're liars. The March 2008 comments -- by Tom's own admission -- were news. And they weren't covered as such by Beggar Media and all of the Cult of St. Barack.
They didn't give a damn.
Now it would appear that the Iraqi children will suffer for their lies. I have no tolernace for unrepentant whores. Throughout the 8 years that Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House, these people were so very good about instructing on ethics and what was a conflict of interest and how awful the mainstream media was and how unaccountable it was and blah, blah, bulls**t.
Given the first chance to whore, they hit the streets running. And for what? A corporatist War Hawk who always publicly promised more war on Afghanistan.
They whored.
[February 8, 2009, Isaiah's "Little Dicky Breaks It Down" and yes, that is the little dick from The Great Orange Satan.]
They want to prove they've got anything else to offer, they're going to have to get accountable. Until they do, no one should consider trusting them. If they get away with this, they will try it over and over again. Either we have a functioning alternative media or we don't. If we do have a functioning one, then people need to start taking accountability for how they slanted their coverage, betrayed their ethics and more and how the result was that a War Hawk who cares more about serving the corporations than serving the people got put into the White House.
I hope the above explains for those confused. I do realize that (a) this story was largely avoided by many, many outlets; (b) 2008 was three years ago and some people paying attention today may have been too young or focused on other things back then; and (c) how difficult it is to grasp that those who preach to us over and over about ethics were the first to betray their own.
[May , 2008, Isaiah's "Sunset Campaign."]
One e-mail (I've only read 40 so far, we just got off the plane a little over an hour ago) asked about: "Go down the list of all the people who swore that Barack Obama would end the Iraq War, that US troops would no longer occupy Iraq, that US troops would be gone. They lied and then they lied again. Over and over." How was it a lie?
There are two ways.
First, there's what was always known and that is the Senate voting records. Barack Obama didn't get sworn in until 2005. So he avoided the 2002 authorization vote on Iraq (which some say approved the war and some -- such as the late Elizabeth Edwards defending her husband's vote -- insisted was calling for more time and inspections). It is a fact that in 2004, he was telling the New York Times (during the DNC convention in Boston) that he would have voted for that authorization had he been in Congress. But he wasn't there. But what you did have was how he voted once he got in. For war, war and more war. His votes were identical to Hillary's.
And yet the liars presented Hillary in the most vile and sexist terms while buffing and lapping at St. Barack. And if you need to do research, you should use links in entries. So much of what happened in 2008 was covered in "The Year of Living Hormonally" and that is named and linke to in the snapshot.
It is there that you will find out about how the record on the war was repeatedly distorted by the likes of Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) and Matthew Rothschild (The Progressive, Progressive Radio Show, etc.). You bring on a Barack supporter and let them rave and you join them in the raving and you never ask a critical question about the war or Barack's votes to support it and continue it. You bring on a Hillary (supporter, rare for them to do but they needed to 'instruct' their audiences in what was the 'wrong path' so they did from time to time) and you immediately began asking them how they could be against the Iraq War and support Hillary? Barack and Hillary had identical records when it came to voting on the Iraq War. Any journalist should have known that. Amy Goodman and Matthew Rothschild lied to advance Barack Obama and lied repeatedly. (Matthew's badgering of novelist Sara Paretsky for her support of Hillary made for especially uncomfortable listening.)
In addition, Barack's advisors weren't trashed while Hillary's were. Hillary's were mocked, laughed at, sneered at, etc. They were supposed War Hawks. Barack's own War Hawks -- including the Carr Center -- were never questioned or mentioned. The entire counter-insurgnecy movement figure heads were publicly backing Barack and that concerned no one. Despite the fact that during the days of Vietnam we damn well knew that counter-insurgency -- a war on the native population -- was wrong and illegal. But the so-called 'left' press didn't want to be bothered with it.
And, let's stay on The Progressive for just one more moment. A right-wing group had initials that formed an ugly term that can't appear in newspapers or be said on broadcast TV (at least it's not supposed to be said). Matthew Rothschild loved Hillary being called this word -- c**t -- and he loved it so much that he linked to The Weekly Standard. Grasp that, The Progressive linked to The Weekly Standard. Not only that, grasp that they did so with a heading of recommended stories. The Progressive recommended The Weekly Standard. Socialist Matthew Rothschild linked to the ultra-conservative, pro-war Weekly Standard. Ethics were trashed, belief systems sold out in order for the Cult of St. Barack to preach their gospel.
[August 3rd, 2008, Isaiah's "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels." Barack's with Cult of St. Barack members Katrina vanden Heuvel, Matthew Rothschild and Betsy Reed.]
The Cult of St. Barack pretended to still have a standard and they applied it to Hillary while giving Barack one pass after another.
Time and again. And, note, Jim's reading over my shoulder and carving out some things for Third including a paragraph that followed "no standard for Barack," so (a) refer to Third tomorrow for more on this topic and (b) if this entry is more disjointed than usal, that's why.
Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richards had real plans for leaving Iraq. Not pie in the sky, not airy statements. How real were those plans? In September 2009, there was a debate of the Dems vying for the party's presidential nomination.
You can refer to Isaiah's "Bloody War Hawks" (above), Rebecca's "craven dems and disgusting peter pace," Kat's "Obama, Edwards & Clinton okay with US trops in Iraq until 2013" and this"Iraq snapshot" for how Hillary, Barack and John Edwards refused to promise to have troops in 2013.
If Barack were the sainted hope of peace that the Beggar Media promised us, he could have taken that pledge. He refused to do so.
All of that and much more told you Barack was not serious about ending the Iraq War.
But maybe people in Beggar Media are just that stupid? I mean, there's got to be a reason that, at her age, Amy Goodman has to beg for dollars on air, right? There has to be a reason that these people are unemployable in real media, right?
So maybe they are just that stupid.
Even if they were that stupid, on March 7th, an event happens that changes everything. How you responded to that event if you were media or a commentator or gas bag determined whether you were lying or telling the truth.
As noted in that day's snapshot, the BBC was airing an interview with Samantha Power (who had quit the Barack Obama campaign that morning, the interview was taped prior to that) where Samantha Power revealed that Barack would decide what he'd do about Iraq if he got elected. But he was promising to have troops out in 16 months? Well, Samantha responds, you can't make that decision until you're in the White House and have examined all the facts.
That was a mind blowing moment.
A candidate's closest advisor had gone on camera to declare that the promise Barack was making to votes wasn't, in fact, for real.
Samantha wasn't just an advisor to Barack after he announced his run for presidency. The War Hawk (who supported the Iraq War though she tries to obscure that today) became Barack's advisor right after he got to the Senate. In fact, the entire War Hawk population of the Carr Center would claim to have Barack's ear. We covered all of this in real time here and at Third Estate Sunday Review. It was possible to cover it.
And it was possible to ignore it.
[June 22, 2008, Isaiah's "Wheel of Greed." Barack's with Cult of St. Barack members Katrina vanden Heuvel, Matthew Rothschild and John Nichols.]
When the BBC aired the interview with Samantha Power and when the US press picked up on it,that's when Beggar Media lost plausible deniability on the charge that they were deliberately lying to put Barack Obama in office and that they would apply no standards to their coverage of Barack and that they would trash their ethics and belief systems in order to whore for Barack.
We covered it in real time, check the March 7, 2008 snapshot. I'd already finished dictating most of the snapshot when Ava was handing me her cell and telling me I had to take the call. A friend in the news division of an American network was explaining what was just breaking and we immediately worked into the snapshot including a rush transcript of Samantha Power's remarks in full.
Samantha Power quit the campaign because of the BBC interview. Not due to the controversy where she had called Hillary a monster. She reviewed all the times in the last week -- in one interview after another -- where she had shot off her mouth and how each could be damaging but she concluded that the not-yet-aired BBC interview was the most damaging and she quit the campaign. She quit, she was not fired.
Her remarks that the promise on Iraq wasn't a promise should have been huge news at The Nation and The Progressive and all the others using the Iraq War to pimp Barack as the 'hero' emerged to save us all.
We didn't get that truth. What we got instead was silence or more lies.
[March 9, 2008, Isaiah's "Kamikaze Sammy" featuring Samantha Power's remark to the BBC.]
As usual, John Nichols chose to go the more lies route. Poor Samatha, he whined in more sentences in a single column than Carrie Bradshaw managed in an entire season of Sex in the City. But he never got around the BBC interview. He had plenty of time to lie and did so repeatedly; most infamously, he lied that Samantha and Hillary were great friends -- at that point the two had met twice and only twice by Samantha Power's own admission. We called it out here.
That column was nothing but lies and distraction from what may be Beggar Media's biggest liar.
In 2008, Barack's campaign was talking tough on doing away with NAFTA, remember? And then it turned out that Barack's campaign was also telling Canadian officials that this was just talk and not to worry. (That statement? It applies to every supposed stand Barack's ever taken. When you wonder why he 'caved' over and over regardless issue, it's because he never meant his words. The pattern was clear with NAFTA.) The Associated Press got ahold of documents proving the meeting took place February 8, 2008 between Canadian officials and Barack's economic advisors. Faced with Barack outright and clearly lying, what did John Nichols do?
Ava and I tackled it -- we were the only ones who did. See "TV: Goodman and Rose 'honoring' bad TV past" and, as you read of John Nichols going on Democracy Now! and insisting that it was a lie, that Hillary's campaign was the one who had met with Canadian officials, not Barack's, and that he had the explosive story and would be publishing it, ask yourself where that story is?
It. Never. Existed.
It was a lie that was tossed out to give the delusional something to hold onto until they could forget. "Oh, it was Hillary! Not our beloved Barack! Oh, I can't wait to read that story!"
[March 4, 2008, Isaiah's "Pinocchio Obama."]
The story never was written because John Nichols was lying. At the end of 2003, for those who've forgotten, John Nichols joined Amy Goodman to explain how his sources knew what was planned for the 2004 DNC convention, how Wesley Clark wasn't really running, just holding things up so that Hillary could take the nomination -- without ever running -- at the 2004 convention.
The two psychos should have been laughed off the air.
But at some point, either the left start's enforcing standards or it doesn't.
[Isaiah's "I Am The War Hawk You Have Been Waiting For" from December 1, 2009 featuring Barack and Cult of St. Barack members Alice Walker, Tom Hayden, Phyllis Bennis, John Nichols and Amy Goodman.]
Norman Solomon's fond of screaming "conspiracy" at the 9-11 Truth Movement. But it wasn't the 9-11 Truth Movement that acted unethically. It was Norman Solomon who, in February of 2008, pursued becoming a pledged delegate to the DNC convention for Barack Obama. And it was Norman Solomon who made a point to note that in his syndicated column because failure to do so would be unethical and, most importantly, lead to his column being pulled from the tiny number of newspapers that carry it. But it was also Norman Solomon who continued to go on the air on KPFK and KPFA radio as an 'independent' analyst from February to the end of June, never telling listeners that he was pledged to Obama while trashing Hillary repeatedly. That's unethical.
In July 2008, under pressure from endless phone calls, e-mails and letters, KPFA was finally forced to start identifying Norman Solomon on air as a pledged delegate for Obama. They should have been doing it all along.
If we had a functioning left, none of this would have happened. But we don't have a functioning left.
It's bad enough that The Nation magazine did not fire John Nichols for his endless lies. They hired Lie Face Melissa Harris-Lacewell who's on yet another marriage and now signs "Melissa Harris-Perry" but will forever be known as Lie Face. Lie Face did so much to help the Barack campaign -- a campaign she began working on in 2007, traveling all over to do campaign work (the state of California in the summer of 2007, for example). Yet somehow she was on Democracy Now! and The Charlie Rose Show in 2008 as an objective and impartial analyst and neither she nor the hosts ever revealed to the audience that not only she was supporting Barack Obama, she was working for the campaign.
If you're working for a campaign -- and Norman Solomon knows this, and FAIR knows this, and The Nation knows this, and, sad for Melissa, Princeton University knows this -- you're required to disclose that fact if you're going on air and commenting on the campaigns. Melissa failed to do that. And she's no longer at Princeton. Lucky for the students because she was so fond of attacking them and deriding them in the press. She's a real hate monger that one and it goes to her own self-identify and her own self-hatred.
And let's put it out there. Ava and I teased in January 2008, thinking the Whore might get honest. We just marveled over her hatred of White women, her foaming at the mouth hatred and her ridiculous statements of "sitting here in all my Blackness." See Melissa had a little personal secret as well.
The woman running from one outlet to another insisting Barack was Black and not bi-racial (he self-billed as bi-racial until he lost his first election, but never mind the facts, when have facts ever been applied to Barack), insisting that she was the authority on this and that she had spoken so the question was no more . . .
That little liar was leading her own little Imitation of Life subplot. See, the woman hating White women in public and sitting there in "all my Blackness"? That woman had a White mother. It wasn't a detail she wanted the press to know. It's difficult to present yourself as THE authentic voice of Black America, to launch the campaign to throw Tavis Smiley off The Tom Joyner Show (Tavis refused to blindly worship Barack, a crime in Melissa's eyes), if you tell the truth.
I was always so afraid that
The uptown friends would see her
Afraid one day when I was grown
That I would be her
In college town away from here
A new identity I found
-- "I'm Living In Shame," written by Berry Gordy Jr., Pam Sawyer, Frank Wilson, Henry Cosby and R. Dean Taylor, recorded by Diana Ross and the Supremes
Poor Melissa. Those consumed with self-hatred and shame never get far. And, again, she's no longer at Princeton. Poor Melissa.
From Lie Face back to the lie being exposed by Samantha Power's remarks to the BBC. There was silence from Beggar Media (though Real Media did report it). We called out the silence in "Editorial: The Whores of Indymedia" in March 2008 and among the people we called out for being silent? Tom Hayden.
Months later, July 4, 2008, Tom suddenly agreed with us writing:
The most shocking aspect of Samantha Powers' forced resignation earlier this year was not that she called Hillary Clinton a "monster" off-camera, but that she flatly stated that Obama would review his whole position on Iraq once becoming president. Again, no one in the media or rival campaigns questioned whether this assertion by Powers was true. Since Obama credited Powers with helping for months in writing his book, The Audacity of Hope, her comments on his inner thinking should have been pounced upon by the pundits.
But, of course, it had been questioned. ABC News reported on it, the Boston Globe reported on it, the Washington Post reported on it (repeatedly). Maybe Tom -- writing at the Huffington Post -- should have held his own Beggar Media accountable? But that would require honesty. And Hillary's campaign called it out in real time -- which led to them being trashed by Greg Sargent and David Corn who insisted the issue didn't matter. We covered this at Third in our reply to Tom's July 4th column (see "Letters to An Old Sell Out: Iraq").
And, honestly, Tom knew about it in real time and was confronted on it in March 2008. He chose to stay silent.
Only because Barack said a little more than "We want to end the war! And we want to end it now!" did Tom finally, months later, write about the March 2008 revelations. And he didn't have the decency to give credit to ABC News, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe or Hillary's campaign. He wanted you to believe that no one had covered it. It was covered and those covering it were attacked for covering it.
So that's why they're liars. The March 2008 comments -- by Tom's own admission -- were news. And they weren't covered as such by Beggar Media and all of the Cult of St. Barack.
They didn't give a damn.
Now it would appear that the Iraqi children will suffer for their lies. I have no tolernace for unrepentant whores. Throughout the 8 years that Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House, these people were so very good about instructing on ethics and what was a conflict of interest and how awful the mainstream media was and how unaccountable it was and blah, blah, bulls**t.
Given the first chance to whore, they hit the streets running. And for what? A corporatist War Hawk who always publicly promised more war on Afghanistan.
They whored.
[February 8, 2009, Isaiah's "Little Dicky Breaks It Down" and yes, that is the little dick from The Great Orange Satan.]
They want to prove they've got anything else to offer, they're going to have to get accountable. Until they do, no one should consider trusting them. If they get away with this, they will try it over and over again. Either we have a functioning alternative media or we don't. If we do have a functioning one, then people need to start taking accountability for how they slanted their coverage, betrayed their ethics and more and how the result was that a War Hawk who cares more about serving the corporations than serving the people got put into the White House.
I hope the above explains for those confused. I do realize that (a) this story was largely avoided by many, many outlets; (b) 2008 was three years ago and some people paying attention today may have been too young or focused on other things back then; and (c) how difficult it is to grasp that those who preach to us over and over about ethics were the first to betray their own.
