The Malarkey Makers — American Politicians’ Warmongering and their Media Propagandists

19 January 2016

This essay addresses two points

First, it expresses irritation with the Obama Administration’s characteristic ass-covering at everyone else’s expense.

Second, it points out that American media carry the Administration’s turd-floating water, without even holding their noses.

In regard to an ass-covering Administration, our American Malarkey Machine

When Iran captured a couple of American Navy patrol boats in Iranian waters, most Americans were probably outraged by the humiliating photographs that emerged:

[H]umiliation-mongers gleefully found their most usefully symbolic image when photographs were released of U.S. sailors being arrested by Iranian soldiers.

They had been briefly detained by the Revolutionary Guard after illegally (and mysteriously) entering Iranian territorial waters. After the Obama administration apologized (horror!) for the encroachment, the sailors were freed without injury.

So how did the Obama Administration explain this?

The initial American explanation of the incident made virtually no sense

But the American media accepted it anyway:

When news first broke of the detention of two U.S. ships in Iranian territorial waters, the U.S. media — aside from depicting it as an act of Iranian aggression — uncritically cited the U.S. government’s explanation for what happened.

One of the boats, we were told, experienced “mechanical failure” and thus “inadvertently drifted” into Iranian waters.

If we accept this nonsense, we have to imply that the second (able) boat followed the distressed one. And then stupidly allowed both vessels, instead of just one, to be taken into Iranian custody.

I have difficulty seeing the US Navy being that incompetent

Sure enough, the Propaganda Machine afterward tacitly acknowledged that its first story was unbelievable.

When one untruth doesn’t work, craft another

Dancing with the spirit of Joseph Goebbels:

The U.S. government itself now says this story was false. There was no engine failure, and the boats were never “in distress.”

Instead, said Defense Secretary Ashton Carter at a press conference this morning, the sailors “made a navigational error that mistakenly took them into Iranian territorial waters.”

He added that they “obviously had misnavigated” when, in the words of the New York Times, “they came within a few miles of Farsi Island, where Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has a naval base.”

We are to infer (it seems) that — despite being long accustomed to floating along Iranian shores — the American Navy suddenly “hired” some especially obtuse navigators.

I can imagine how both crews feel about this federally-sponsored, reputation-shredding nonsense

Our troops undertake enough risk every day, without having their self-serving political leaders make them look unwarrantedly foolish:

[A]t no point did either of the ships notify anyone that they had inadvertently “misnavigated” into Iranian territorial waters, a significant enough event that would warrant some sort of radio or other notification.

“U.S. defense officials were befuddled about how both vessels’ navigational systems failed to alert them that they were entering Iranian waters,” reported the Daily Beast’s Nancy Youseff on Tuesday night.

[Defense Secretary] Carter sought to explain this away by saying, “It may have been they were trying to sort it out at the time when they encountered the Iranian boats.”

Beyond that, “misnavigating” within a few miles of an Iranian Guard Corps naval base is a striking coincidence . . . .

In truth, when our troops go somewhere, we can safely assume they went there on purpose.

Second — what especially got me about this affair is our media’s sycophantic acceptance of whatever the professional liars in Washington have to say

As Glenn Greenwald noted, it is not as if our media has no previous experience with our Government’s now long record of telling easily detected lies:

This happens over and over. A significant incident occurs, such as the U.S. bombing of an MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The U.S. government makes claims about what happened. The U.S. media uncritically repeat them over and over.

And then the U.S. government just blithely changes its story repeatedly, implicitly admitting that the tales it originally told were utterly false. But the next time a similar event happens, there is no heightened skepticism of U.S. government claims: its media treat them as Gospel.

The moral? — Government lying leads to patriotically inspired misimpressions and (therefore) to unnecessary international hostilities

That’s why I mentioned Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. An uncritical press worsens our already jingoistic tendency toward self-destructive warmongering.

More narrowly, I really do not approve of the Political Establishment making our troops look silly or incompetent under circumstances in which they were almost certainly carrying out orders.

Honor, courage, commitment. These are the Navy and Marine Corps’ core values.

Which values guide our political leaders? The opposite of the Navy-Marine creed?

PeteFree.com

The Malarkey Makers — American Politicians’ Warmongering and their Media Propagandists