The Fright to Remain Silent

Ignorance is indeed bliss, especially for those enforcing it! The Bush administration has made it abundantly clear that the media will never to be allowed to operate freely or independently.

Astonishingly, even the usually caustic and sarcastic Maureen Dowd, the darling of the 'liberal' media, glamorously appointed and anointed to her perch at The New York Times, has blunted her latest word venom salvo directed at her Republican nemesis, George W. Bush. Although Ms. Dowd effectively covers all the bases, she fails to deliver the knockout punch.

Dowd: 'Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe in are those written to the 'journalists' Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news releases. 'The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like 'Fair and Balanced' coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.'

As to her reference to a 'Potemkin press village at home,' Tom Engelhardt takes that argument overseas for us. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush White House is a media whitewash, and a 'regime,' not an administration! The Bush gang operates precisely in the same manner as tyrants Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, among others. And all tyrants require complete and total obedience to their reign of power, enforced by a corresponding reign of terror.

Let's look even more deeply at how the regime wields 'carrot and stick' control over the press. Because of her justified disgust with this administration, that Great Dame of the American press, Helen Thomas, has been relegated to junior status via a rear seating assignment during presidential press conferences. Reporters are being threatened with prison for investigating and reporting on government corruption by the very government they are supposed to be investigating. Yet, compliant Walter Duranty-types are rewarded with taxpayer cash! Now if that doesn't smack of Hitlerian or Stalinist intimidation, I'm hard pressed to think of a better example!

And although Maureen and her Times covered all the bases, consider the perverted absence of professional journalistic curiosity that could easily morph into the biggest blockbuster, bombshell front page splash in news reporting history. As Engelhardt offers in his February 27^th piece, 'In a sense, our President's world has increasingly been filled with nothing but James Guckert clones. Guckert is, of course, the 'journalist' who, using the alias Jeff Gannon, regularly attended presidential news conferences and lobbed softball questions George's way. The Gannon case, or 'Gannongate,' has -- are you surprised? -- hardly been touched on by most of the mainstream media despite its lurid trail leading to internet porn sites and a seamy underside of gay culture -- issues that normally would glue eyes to TV sets and sell gazillions of papers (and that in the Clinton era would have rocked the administration). On the other hand, it did cause an uproar in the world of the political Internet, where, if we were to be honest -- and stop claiming to be shocked, shocked -- we would quickly admit that almost all of George's world has essentially filled up with Gannons (though not necessarily with the porn connections).' [Emphasis mine.]

This isn't merely a case of passive outrage as offered by Bill Press in the Tallahassee Democrat, but smacks outrageously as proof of an orchestrated conspiracy between a subservient press and totalitarian government. Press is painfully correct in dashing Limbaugh's national hoax of a 'liberal' media! It is yet another Bush crime family outrage upon America, as is their large accumulation of wealth via their patriarch's connection to Rothschild-Warburg Zionist bankers who financed Adolf Hitler's Nazis and the Holocaust. [Note: see Tarpley, Chapter 2]

In spite of the attempts by Congresspersons John Conyers and Louise Slaughter to shed light on this huge scandal, without the support of the press and the required public outrage, this inquiry will go the way of the Valerie Plame scandal, the AIPAC spy fiasco, and the secret Israeli to China arms deal.

And even when our military is ordered to direct fire upon journalists, the frightened media can no longer cite protection via the now Bush-raped Geneva Conventions and our own Bill of Rights. Refusing to pull the Gannon chain on Bush, the media clearly demonstrates its dependence upon the banking interests that own them, allowing them to slide further into total irrelevance.