Bill Moyers Special Comment to Obama - "Mr. President. We need a fighter."
America is the best show on earth .
...The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a "symbiosis of suffering and spectacle." As Chris Hedges argues,
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs ... through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
Quote from "Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle" by Henry A. Giroux, Truthout.or, Sept. 2,2009
And here are some examples of that hardness and cruelty and lack of empathy in the following examples of quotes by Hate Mongering racist Rush Limbaugh the darling of the Republican party and the Conservative movement in the United States.
This is what passes for civil discourse in America today.
I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark. Rush Limbaugh
You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.
Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?
The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies
They’re 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?
Take that bone out of your nose and call me back(to an African American female caller).
Borrowed From :Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes By Casey Gane-McCalla Newsone.com October 20, 2008
and an example of one of the videos on Gane-McCalla's site:
Limbaugh’s Racist Rant on Obama
and from Rev. Falwell & Pat Robertson -those two paragons of morality and religious fervor speaking for God and Jesus-
On the terror attacks of September 11, 2001:
Jerry Falwell:"The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this."
Pat Robertson: "Well, yes."
Jerry Falwell: "And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, – all of them who try to secularize America – I point the thing in their face and say 'you helped this happen'."
Pat Robertson: "I totally concur, and the problem is we've adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government, and so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do, and the top people, of course, is the court system."
-- The 700 Club,
September 13, 2001
Millions of supposedly sane and intelligent American Christians just sat around nodding their heads on hearing these insane irrational statements by Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell though some were hopeful that this event was the sign of the Last Days & the Rapture.
Meanwhile Obama's adviser Van Jones is attacked for signing a petition which he believed was merely to investigate the 9/11 attacks to discover what may have gone wrong was the Bush government merely asleep at the wheel or were there steps they could have taken or was it beyond any one's ability or imagination to contemplate such a series of events ?
As Henry A. Giroux points out America is a society which lacks sympathy or empathy for those who for wahatever reason fall on hard times. The attitude is that people who prosper prosper because they are worthy somehow whether they were born into wealth or worked for it. The winners is what Americans celebrate not the losers . As far as the winners are concerned the losers are not worth even giving a second thought to.
Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle by Henry A. Giroux, Truthout.or, Sept. 2,2009
...Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform's public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance? Or, for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system? Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers - there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide who may live and who may die
...A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality; the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big" government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it goes.
Glenn Beck, the alleged voice of the common man, appearing on the "Fox & Friends" morning show, calls President Obama a "racist" and then accuses him of "having a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh unapologetically states that James Early Ray, the confessed killer of Martin Luther King Jr., should be given a posthumous Medal of Honor, while his counterpart in right-wing hate, talk radio host Michael Savage, states on his show, "You know, when I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi. That's what I see - how do you like that? - a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children." He also claims that Obama is "surrounded by terrorists" and is "raping America." This is a variation of a crude theme established by Ann Coulter, who refers to Bill Clinton as a "very good rapist."
Even worse, Obama is a "neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making," who plans to "force children into a paramilitary domestic army." And this is just a small sampling of the kind of hate talk that permeates right-wing media. This could be dismissed as loony right-wing political theater if it were not for the low levels of civic literacy displayed by so many Americans who choose to believe and invest in this type of hate talk. On the contrary, while it may be idiocy, it reveals a powerful set of political, economic and educational forces at work in miseducating the American public while at the same time extending the culture of cruelty. One central task of any viable form of politics is to analyze the culture of cruelty and its overt and covert dimensions of violence, often parading as entertainment.
Underlying the culture of cruelty that reached its apogee during the Bush administration, was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice. But if a legal culture emerged that made violence and human suffering socially acceptable, popular culture rendered such violence pleasurable by commodifying, aestheticizing and spectacularizing it...
and Giroux concludes
...The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a "symbiosis of suffering and spectacle." As Chris Hedges argues,
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs ... through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
But here is another illustration which shows that President Obama and his Defence Secretary Robert Gates are also in the business as the Bush/Cheney Regime was in the use of draconian censorship of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so Americans could continue to believe it is a sanitized war with few casualties though some 5,000 Americans have dies and in Iraq some million to a million and a half Iraqis have died . But the slaughtering of innocents by American forces is still kept under the radar in America though the rest of the world has been seeing the carnage since the war first began. Journalists that is "Real Journalists" from other countries have gone into Iraq to get a picture of the reality of the war and so are no embedded with American or British forces who control the information they get and what they get to see and what they are not permitted to see. But it is hard to say if Americans might view the war differently if they saw photos and videos of the slaughtered innocents since Abu Ghraib was a bombshell outside America but inside America it was treated as soldiers just having a little fun so what can we expect from those who are at the center of the American Empire like the French, the Spanish,the Dutch, and the British etc. before them they have little regard for other peoples or nations.Those peoples and nations for the American Empire are just a means to their ends, their interests even if it just a matter of letting loose on a people ie Iraqis to avenge America for something these people had nothing to do with.Bloodletting is the goal and war is merely the game.
"Sanitizing War and Occupation Photo of Dying Marine Draws Fire from Pentagon" By Matthew Shaer via Information Clearing House
September 05, 2009 "CSM" -- - Defense Secretary Robert Gates has condemned the Associated Press decision to release a photograph of a US Marine wounded during a battle in the Helmand province of southern Afghanistan. The Marine, Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard of New Portland, Maine, was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in a Taliban ambush on Aug. 14. He later died of his wounds.
In the AP photograph, Bernard is pictured lying on his side on a sandy slope. The image is blurry, but Bernard appears to be bleeding; two other Marines stand over him, attending to his wounds. The caption, titled “Afghanistan Death of a Marine,” identifies the location as the village of Dahaneh. The photographer is Julie Jacobson, who also took the image at the top of this post. The AP reports that Bernard later died on the operating table at a nearby field hospital.
“AP journalists document world events every day. Afghanistan is no exception,” Santiago Lyon, the wire services’ director of photography, said in a statement. “We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is.” In a story on the ambush, the AP reported that Bernard’s death came during the “deadliest month of the deadliest year since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
White House Adviser Resigns Amid 9/11 Controversy CNN Sep. 3,2009 via truthout.org
Washington - Presidential adviser Van Jones is resigning after coming under fire for signing a controversial petition regarding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
... Jones, who denied agreeing with the petition and issued an apology last week, said he was a victim of health-care reform opponents.
"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones said in the statement. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."
"But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future," Jones said.
The Jones controversy centers on a 2004 petition he signed on a Web site that said: "A call for immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11 attacks to occur."
and so it goes,
GORD.
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