Foolish but dangerous attempts to manage the media by Team Obama

 Each President for several generations whittles away our freedoms.  Each party has their preferences in freedoms to erode; neither displays much interest in expanding our political and economic interests — although all display generosity in trivial matters, and make token efforts on some important matters.  Now Obama takes the knife.

Media manipulation has been a primary tactic of US administrations since Kennedy.  The slow dying of the mainstream media and birth of new media (talk radio, cable news, the Internet) complicates government efforts to control the flow of information to the public.  Now they strike back, with some tentative strikes.  As usual with Team Obama, their execution is amateurish — but that should not mask the danger of the government directly targeting news agencies.  History suggests that this is just the another step in a long process with an unpleasant ending. 

This post looks at two examples, with links to additional information at the end.  First the proposed FCC rules to regulate the Internet.

• PDF of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking by Federal Communications Commission – Rules to Preserve the Free and Open Internet

Second, Team Obama attempts to suppress Fox News (shrewd “divide and conquer” tactics):

1. Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz,  CNN, 11 October 2009 — transcript of interview with Anita Dunn (White House Communications Director)
2. “State of the Union with John King“, CNN, 18 October 2009 — Transcript of  interview with Rahm Emanuel (White House Chief of Staff)
3. Fox returns fire:   “The Radical Truth About Anita Dunn“, Glenn Beck, Fox News, 15 October 2009 – Anita Dunn tells schoolkids about Mao’s insights.

Analysis (no excerpts given)

(a)  “Media Matters coordinates campaign against ‘lethal’ Fox“, Politico, 23 October 2009 — Unintenetional irony by Media Matters, illustrating the policial nature of Team Obama’s attack on Fox.

(b)  “Behind the War Between White House and Fox“, New York Times, 23 October 2009 — Excellent and fair analysis, stirred from their slumber by the competition from new media like Fox News.

(c)  A summary of the NYT story — “In other words, their problem is not that Fox isn’t a real news organization, their problem is that it is.“  From “The White House’s Real Problem with Fox“, Rich Lowry, National Review Online, 23 October 2009

(d)  Eighteen thousand webposts about the short skirts of Fox News Anchorwomen — evidence that Fox News has smart management and that Americans need either to get out more or watch more foreign TV.

A note from the past

Please read the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ in Whitney vs. California (1929). See the Wikipedia entry for details; text is from Justia.com.

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom.

Excerpts

(1)  Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz,  CNN, 11 October 2009 — transcript of interview with Anita Dunn (White House Communications Director).  Red emphasis added.

TomGram: “The Imperial Presidency 2.0″

The power of the Presidency grows inexorably for many reason.  One is the political ratchet:  each Administration increases some aspects of the Executive’s powers, amidst praise from its partisans and impotent criticism from the loyal opposition.  Eventually they trade places, but seldom do these expanded powers get reversed — only a new wave of growth begins.

The latest TomDispatch provides more evidence of this ominous trend.

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt

October 7th marked the eighth anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion of Afghanistan and so of the… well, can we really call it a war?… that won’t end, that American commanders there now predict could last for another decade or more. And yet, here’s the weird thing: because Congress no longer actually declares war, we officially must be fighting something else entirely. Put another way, we are now heading for the longest undeclared war in U.S. history (depending on how you count up the Vietnam years).

The Obama administration, having doubled down on Afghanistan in March, sending another 21,000 or more U.S. troops as well as extra contingents of civilians, deciding to put a billion dollars into a new embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and build new or expanded embassy and consular facilities, roads, bases, and prisons in Afghanistan, is now considering yet another expansion of the [you fill in the blank], including up to 40,000 — some reports now say 80,000 — U.S. troops, more drone air strikes, and more training of Afghan forces. And yet, the U.S. is still operating on the pallid “authorization for use of military force” passed by Congress on September 18, 2001 at the behest of the Bush administration. It only authorizes the president “to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.” No more. War itself — despite all the fighting, the death, and the money spent — has never been declared, and in our present era of ever expanding presidential power, it never will be.

In other words, we are at war without being at war. As in every war since World War II ended, we find ourselves once again in a presidential conflict backed by Congress. Although Senator John Kerry’s Foreign Relations Committee has held hearings on “how the nation should declare war” (a subject that you might think the Constitution had definitively settled), don’t count on the Obama administration to return to Congress for an actual declaration of war as it moves forward in the Af-Pak theater of operations.

George W. Bush is gone, but as David Swanson, TomDispatch regular and author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, makes clear, our increasingly engorged presidency remains essentially untouched, despite the new occupant in the White House.

David Swanson explains how Presidential Power Grows

“Will You Love Every Future President?“, By David Swanson, TomDispatch, 15 October 2009 — Reposted in full with permission.

Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Some of the new powers that those two stole from Congress, the courts, the states, and us the people are being abused less severely in this new age of Obama; others, more so; but far more crucially, in a pattern followed by recent presidencies, all are being maintained, if not expanded, and thus more firmly cemented into place for future presidents to use. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you are likely to strongly oppose some major decisions of some future presidents. So it shouldn’t be hard to envision some pretty undesirable consequences that might flow from presidential power that increasingly approaches the absolute.

The three kinds of advocacy for the Af-Pak War

Summary:  After years of conditioning, advocates of the Af-Pak can trot out the most shoddy reasoning without fear of ridicule.  When reading these things we should chant the mantra of the 21st century American:  Say it now and say it loud — we are sheep and we’re proud!

There are three forms of reasoning used to support the Af-Pak war: 

1. deduction:  from general premises to a specific conclusion
2. induction:  from specific facts to a general conclusion
3. repetition:  repeat the assertion loudly and with conviction

As their arguments have been exploded — examined only after 7 years of war — they increasingly resort to the third method, relying on their almost total control of the mainstream media.  Here’s today’s example, from ”Counterintuitive counterinsurgency“, Richard Fontaine and John Nagl, op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2009 — “An illegitimate election in Afghanistan does not mean legitimate American military and political goals can’t be met.”  Excerpt:

Obama is just like Jack Kennedy!

Summary:  There is no need to read the daily news when one can remain current by reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.  It’s better written than any daily paper, and more informative about today’s events (by virtue of the perspective it provides on them).

Many of Obama’s supporters claim that he’s similar to Jack Kennedy.  They are so right.  Today’s example comes from Glen Greenwald, Salon, 12 October 2009:

As for the “you-have-to-wait” justification, here’s the time-line of the Democratic Party mentality on all such matters:

• 2004-2006:  ”You have to wait until we win a Congressional majority in the 2006 midterms.”
• 2006-2008:  “You have to wait until we win the White House in 2008.”
• January-May, 2009:  “You have to wait until we have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.”
• Currently:  “You have to wait until after the 2010 midterms so we preserve our majority” or “you have to wait until Obama is safely re-elected in 2012.”

Once Obama is safely re-elected, it will be:  ”you have to wait so you don’t jeopardize the 2014 midterms.” That’s the mentality that produces majority power which exists for no real purpose but to perpetuate itself.

A voice from the past shows the similarity:  Chapter 7 of The Best and the Brightest:

Stop and reflect on this key moment in US history

Stop and savor this moment, amidst the rush of our daily lives.  The Nobel Committee highlighted for us that we ate at a  key moment in history.  Andrew Bacevich explains why in “Afghanistan – the proxy war“, op-ed in the Boston Globe, 11 October 2009 — The most important and insightful part is at the end.  Excerpt:

The question of the moment, framed by the prowar camp, goes like this:  Will the president approve the Afghanistan strategy proposed by his handpicked commander General Stanley McChrystal? Or will he reject that plan and accept defeat, thereby inviting the recurrence of 9/11 on an even larger scale? Yet within this camp the appeal of the McChrystal plan lies less in its intrinsic merits, which are exceedingly dubious, than in its implications.

If the president approves the McChrystal plan he will implicitly:

• Anoint counterinsurgency – protracted campaigns of armed nation-building – as the new American way of war.
• Embrace George W. Bush’s concept of open-ended war as the essential response to violent jihadism (even if the Obama White House has jettisoned the label “global war on terror’’).
• Affirm that military might will remain the principal instrument for exercising American global leadership, as has been the case for decades.

Implementing the McChrystal plan will perpetuate the longstanding fundamentals of US national security policy: maintaining a global military presence, configuring US forces for global power projection, and employing those forces to intervene on a global basis.

Change, the promise and the reality

“Entangled Giant“

By Garry Wills, New York Review of Books, 8 October 2009 — I strongly recommend reading this, about a subject of the greatest importance to Americans:  change, the promise of change, and how do we force reform.   While the right-wing condemns Obama as a dangerous leftist radical, the reality is that the changes has proposed are small — and those he has effected so far are tiny.

Excerpt

George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease — torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror” — all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

DoD did not consider troop levels when devising our latest Af-Pak war plans, more evidence that their OODA loop is broken

This is an update to How many troops would it take to win in Afghanistan?, 15 September 2009. 

Today we see more evidence that the White House and DoD did virtually ignored the key question of troop levels when devising their latest Afghanistan strategy — and (on a larger scale) that our national decision-making process is broken.

Excerpt from “Civilian, Military Officials at Odds Over Resources Needed for Afghan Mission“, Washington Post, 8 October 2009 (red emphasis added):

In early March, after weeks of debate across a conference table in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the participants in President Obama’s strategic review of the war in Afghanistan figured that the most contentious part of their discussions was behind them. Everyone, save Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, agreed that the United States needed to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency mission to defeat the Taliban.

That conclusion, which was later endorsed by the president and members of his national security team, would become the first in a set of recommendations contained in an administration white paper outlining what Obama called “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Preventing al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan, the document stated, would require “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy.”

To senior military commanders, the sentence was unambiguous: U.S. and NATO forces would have to change the way they operated in Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents, the troops would have to concentrate on protecting the good Afghans from the bad ones. And to carry out such a counterinsurgency effort the way its doctrine prescribes, the military would almost certainly need more boots on the ground.

To some civilians who participated in the strategic review, that conclusion was much less clear. Some took it as inevitable that more troops would be needed, but others thought the thrust of the new approach was to send over scores more diplomats and reconstruction experts. They figured a counterinsurgency mission could be accomplished with the forces already in the country, plus the 17,000 new troops Obama had authorized in February.

“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency.

Tom Friedman provides a window to the thinking of our ruling elites

Our elites tolerate the republic, as it provides a stable political regime without limiting their ability to amass wealth and power (for details see “Wealth, Income, and Power” by G. William Domhoff).  Thomas Friedman explains how this works in “Our One-Party Democracy“, op-ed in the New York Times, 8 September 2009.

His logic is bizarre but inconsequential.

“The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying ‘no.’”

So a vibrant two-party democracy requires both political parties to agree.  Nonsensical, but it is after all just propaganda.

“From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
— Advice from Screwtape to his nephew, from chapter I of The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

More sincere, I suspect, is his admiration for autocratic states.

Motto for the Obama administration: “The more things change, …”

Today we have here an excerpt from “Bush’s Third Term? You’re Living It“,  David Swanson, TomDispatch, 1 September 2009 – Posted with permission. At the end are links to other posts about change and the Obama administration.

Introduction by Tom Englehardt

A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Moreover, the new president remains on the “withdrawal” schedule the previous administration laid out for him with the same caveats being issued about whether it can even be met.

That administration also built a humongous, three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the most expensive on the planet. Staffed with approximately 1,000 “diplomats,” it was clearly meant to be a massive command center for Iraq (and, given neocon dreams, the region). Last weekend, well into the Obama era, the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s yearly budget for “running” that embassy — $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint) in 2009 — will actually rise to $1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In addition, the Obama administration now plans to invest upwards of a billion dollars in constructing a massive embassy in Islamabad and other diplomatic facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will be a massive influx of “diplomats,” and here, too, a U.S. command center for the region is clearly being created.

What’s striking are the continuities in American foreign and military policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that the controversial “missile defense shield” the Bush administration was insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech Republic is being reconsidered in a many-months-long Obama administration “review.” While this should be welcomed, the only option mentioned involved putting it elsewhere — in Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans. At stake is one of the great military-industrial boondoggles of our age. Yet cancellation is, it seems, beyond consideration in Washington.

Stratfor looks at Obama’s foreign policy, sees Bush’s foreign policy

Many on the right wing describe President Obama in extreme terms, as if he has made large changes from Bush’s policy.   Obama-fuhrer, socialist, nihilist, and extreme leftist are some of the labels they use.

With a few exceptions, their premise is incorrect.  While Obama promised change, he has delivered continuity.  Quite a disappointment for many who voted for him.

In this article George Friedman examines Obama’s foreign policy.    Stratfor’s message is clear:  US foreign policy is set by our ruling elites, and remains immutable by elections so long as the voters remain sheep.  It’s the status quo that you can believe in.

“Obama’s Foreign Policy: The End of the Beginning“, George Friedman, Stratfor, 24 August 2009 — This post first shows an exact, the second shows the full article.  Reposted with permission.

(1)  Key quotes

As August draws to a close, so does the first phase of the Obama presidency. The first months of any U.S. presidency are spent filling key positions and learning the levers of foreign and national security policy. … Then September comes and the world gets back in motion, and the first phase of the president’s foreign policy ends. The president is no longer thinking about what sort of foreign policy he will have; he now has a foreign policy that he is carrying out.

We therefore are at a good point to stop and consider not what U.S. President Barack Obama will do in the realm of foreign policy, but what he has done and is doing. As we have mentioned before, the single most remarkable thing about Obama’s foreign policy is how consistent it is with the policies of former President George W. Bush. This is not surprising. Presidents operate in the world of constraints; their options are limited. Still, it is worth pausing to note how little Obama has deviated from the Bush foreign policy.