How to create an Angry American

Past time to Ditch the Denial & Sense of Powerlessness

Time to Translate Anger into Action.

Footnote: As of this date, Imperial Republican President Bush has yet to attend one funeral of any soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan (where Osama Bin Laden still hides).

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press, press failures, Failure of the Media, Jon Stewart, Particpatory Democracy, voter responsibility, Citizen Action

The HUGE disconnect between participatory democracy and military/militarism.

For me the Washington Post article today about the Rand 'advertising/marketing/branding' study for the Pentagon (links below) once more brings into focus and reinforces the major, likely insurmountable philosophical deficit of this admin (and its lackies both in the military and outside of it) — i.e., the Bush-Cheney administration's failure to understand much less practice participatory democracy both abroad and at home.

I see it in my ex-marine father and too many of his 'greatest generation' cohorts — especially the southern ones — who were entrained by the military, taught 'obedience to authority' through their WWII military service at tender teen ages and never grew beyond it. These men made great followers, committed to rule enforcement, upholding the rule of law (theoretically), but not so great independent thinkers and not very deep thinkers.

They naively believe that if only everyone followed the rules, all would be okay. They fail to analyze the context of the rules, much less the context of history. They are so easily confused and overwhelmed by analyzing rhetoric vs actions, hypocrisy and all the contradictions of power holders (not to mention downright mendacity and outright lying) that it was simply easier to have stopped thinking or learning to think way back when. Following orders, upholding social order has been their greatest strength — and strongest commitment — since those days.

It's also their most glaring deficit. They are still being willingly entrained by the Bushes, Cheneys, Limbaughs, O'Reilly's, etc etc — those who reap great personal wealth and power from the greatest followers' superficial grasp of democracy — one in which majority rules and following the rules defines their primary understanding of democracy — while failing to remember we are a republic, which theoretically upholds and protects the EQUAL rights of any and all citizens who are considered minorities.

The challenge for the advertising study ... was to find "something we can learn from Madison Avenue or from the marketers, the best in the world, that might help us when we're trying to deliver a message about what democracy is." ... the problem is "how we influence them to be on our side, or at least not be an enemy" when "what they see is armor." The goal of such studies ... is to distill what works and incorporate it into future training.

The fact that this recent Rand study is organized around the concepts of advertising, branding, and marketing the concept of democracy instead of actually modeling, teaching and practicing participatory democracy demonstrates the glib shallowness of this administration (its handlers, thinkers, strategizers and its military leaders). It shows both a severe contempt for and a foundational failure to understand much less practice participatory democracy.

Yet, once more, it does indicate their complete commitment and servitude to the fundamental mandates of capitalism: Selling for Profit (and power) ahead of everything and everyone else.

What is that saying — something along the lines of: great soldiers don't necessarily make great citizens?

We already know of one worse-than-poor, layabout national guardsman who has made possibly (likely) The Worst President Ever.

Sadly, disturbingly, this war, this administration, the severe lack of critical thinkers in the military industrial complex prove it with a vengeance.

If there was ever a time to Question Authority, this is it. We stand at the edge of an epochal precipice — full of world-life-society-country-citizen-altering challenges — and our responses to them will determine whether Americans will step forward to actively participate in our rapidly fading democratic heritage (and think critically about who benefits from the decisions which are made by those in power) or stand still to passively consume, produce profits for the powerful and rich, and remain obedient to authority except in the most superficial, self-destructive, meaningless ways.

Do we have any hope for meeting the challenge? What do you think?

The Washington Post article, entitled "The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue: U.S. Needs to Devise a Different 'Brand' to Win Over the Iraqi People, Study Advises" is here:

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U.S. Military, participatory democracy, entrainment, branding, marketing

Frank Rich: When Cheney the Vice Does It, It’s Not Illegal

When the Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal

By FRANK RICH
July 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes.com


WHO knew that mocking the Constitution could be nearly as funny as shooting a hunting buddy in the face? Among other comic dividends, Dick Cheney’s legal theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch yielded a priceless weeklong series on “The Daily Show” and an online “Doonesbury Poll,” conducted at Slate, to name Mr. Cheney’s indeterminate branch of government.

The ridicule was so widespread that finally even this White House had to blink. By midweek, it had abandoned that particularly ludicrous argument, if not its spurious larger claim that Mr. Cheney gets a free pass to ignore rules regulating federal officials’ handling of government secrets.

That retreat might allow us to mark the end of this installment of the Bush-Cheney Follies but for one nagging problem: Not for the first time in the history of this administration — or the hundredth — has the real story been lost amid the Washington kerfuffle. Once the laughter subsides and you look deeper into the narrative leading up to the punch line, you can unearth a buried White House plot that is more damning than the official scandal. This plot once again snakes back to the sinister origins of the Iraq war, to the Valerie Wilson leak case and to the press failures that enabled the administration to abuse truth and the law for too long.

One journalist who hasn’t failed is Mark Silva of The Chicago Tribune. He first reported more than a year ago, in May 2006, the essentials of the “news” at the heart of the recent Cheney ruckus. Mr. Silva found that the vice president was not filing required reports on his office’s use of classified documents because he asserted that his role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, gave him an exemption.

This scoop went unnoticed by nearly everybody. It would still be forgotten today had not Henry Waxman, the dogged House inquisitor, called out Mr. Cheney 10 days ago, detailing still more egregious examples of the vice president’s flouting of the law, including his effort to shut down an oversight agency in charge of policing him. The congressman’s brief set off the firestorm that launched a thousand late-night gags.

That’s all to the public good, but hiding in plain sight was the little-noted content of the Bush executive order that Mr. Cheney is accused of violating. On close examination, this obscure 2003 document, thrust into the light only because the vice president so blatantly defied it, turns out to be yet another piece of self-incriminating evidence illuminating the White House’s guilt in ginning up its false case for war.

The tale of the document begins in August 2001, when the Bush administration initiated a review of the previous executive order on classified materials signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The Clinton order had been acclaimed in its day as a victory for transparency because it mandated the automatic declassification of most government files after 25 years.

It was predictable that the obsessively secretive Bush team would undermine the Clinton order. What was once a measure to make government more open would be redrawn to do the opposite. And sure enough, when the White House finally released its revised version, the scant news coverage focused on how the new rules postponed the Clinton deadline for automatic declassification and tightened secrecy so much that previously declassified documents could be reclassified.

But few noticed another change inserted five times in the revised text: every provision that gave powers to the president over classified documents was amended to give the identical powers to the vice president. This unprecedented increase in vice-presidential clout, though spelled out in black and white, went virtually unremarked in contemporary news accounts.

Given all the other unprecedented prerogatives that President Bush has handed his vice president, this one might seem to be just more of the same. But both the timing of the executive order and the subsequent use Mr. Cheney would make of it reveal its special importance in the games that the White House played with prewar intelligence.

The obvious juncture for Mr. Bush to bestow these new powers on his vice president, you might expect, would have been soon after 9/11, especially since the review process on the Clinton order started a month earlier and could be expedited, as so much other governmental machinery was, to meet the urgent national-security crisis. Yet the new executive order languished for another 18 months, only to be published and signed with no fanfare on March 25, 2003, a week after the invasion of Iraq began.

Why then? It was throughout March, both on the eve of the war and right after “Shock and Awe,” that the White House’s most urgent case for Iraq’s imminent threat began to unravel. That case had been built around the scariest of Saddam’s supposed W.M.D., the nuclear weapons that could engulf America in mushroom clouds, and the White House had pushed it relentlessly, despite a lack of evidence. On “Meet the Press” on March 16, Mr. Cheney pressed that doomsday button one more time: “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” But even as the vice president spoke, such claims were at last being strenuously challenged in public.

Nine days earlier Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency had announced that documents supposedly attesting to Saddam’s attempt to secure uranium in Niger were “not authentic.” A then-obscure retired diplomat, Joseph Wilson, piped in on CNN, calling the case “outrageous.”

Soon both Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Congressman Waxman wrote letters (to the F.B.I. and the president, respectively) questioning whether we were going to war because of what Mr. Waxman labeled “a hoax.” And this wasn’t the only administration use of intelligence that was under increasing scrutiny. The newly formed 9/11 commission set its first open hearings for March 31 and requested some half-million documents, including those pertaining to what the White House knew about Al Qaeda’s threat during the summer of 2001.

The new executive order that Mr. Bush signed on March 25 was ingenious. By giving Mr. Cheney the same classification powers he had, Mr. Bush gave his vice president a free hand to wield a clandestine weapon: he could use leaks to punish administration critics.

That weapon would be employed less than four months later. Under Mr. Bush’s direction, Mr. Cheney deputized Scooter Libby to leak highly selective and misleading portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to pet reporters as he tried to discredit Mr. Wilson. By then, Mr. Wilson had emerged as the most vocal former government official accusing the White House of not telling the truth before the war.

Because of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, we would learn three years later about the offensive conducted by Mr. Libby on behalf of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. That revelation prompted the vice president to acknowledge his enhanced powers in an unguarded moment in a February 2006 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News. Asked by Mr. Hume with some incredulity if “a vice president has the authority to declassify information,” Mr. Cheney replied, “There is an executive order to that effect.” He was referring to the order of March 2003.

Even now, few have made the connection between this month’s Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.

Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.” Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president’s own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.

Last week The Washington Post ran a first-rate investigative series on the entire Cheney vice presidency. Readers posting comments were largely enthusiastic, but a few griped. “Six and a half years too late,” said one. “Four years late and billions of dollars short,” said another. Such complaints reflect the bitter legacy of much of the Washington press’s failure to penetrate the hyping of prewar intelligence and, later, the import of the Fitzgerald investigation.

We’re still playing catch-up. In a week in which the C.I.A. belatedly released severely censored secrets about agency scandals dating back a half-century, you have to wonder what else was done behind the shield of an executive order signed just after the Ides of March four years ago. Another half-century could pass before Americans learn the full story of the secrets buried by Mr. Cheney and his boss to cover up their deceitful path to war.

www.buzzzed.com

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Chicago Tribune, Mark Silva, press, MSM, media, mainstream media, press failures

Cracking the Hermetic Seals: Press starts acting like reporters instead of stenographers — Better Late than Never

What's Leaking Out of the White House
By Peter Baker, Washington Post
Sunday, April 8, 2007

Shortly before leaving Moscow after four years covering Russia, I was granted a rare audience by a top Kremlin official. As we talked about Vladimir Putin and his relationship with President Bush, the Kremlin official compared the Bush team to the Bolsheviks and laughed at how secretive their White House appeared. "They've adopted some of our techniques with the press," he said.

For most of the past six years, journalists covering the White House have indeed been forced to master the art of Kremlinology. The famously disciplined and leak-averse Bush team succeeded at hermetically sealing the building, keeping behind-the-scenes machinations, well, behind the scenes. Deprived of any genuine information about how the institution operated, reporters were left to extrapolate what was really going on based on who was standing where at a Rose Garden photo op.

But something surprising has been happening in the past few months. The hermetic seal is showing cracks, and now the most disciplined administration in modern times has begun to see its internal workings seep into public view. Bush's shake-up of his Iraq team appeared in the newspapers before he was ready to announce it. His fight with the Joint Chiefs of Staff over plans to send more troops to Iraq played out on the front page for weeks. Secret memos by his national security adviser and his old defense secretary showed up in print. And unnamed officials put out word that Bush's new defense secretary tried unsuccessfully to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"You always have more leaks when you have a combination of a late term and big controversy," observed Marlin Fitzwater, the only person to serve as press secretary to two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "Between the war and the last two years in office, I think it's pretty normal to have this kind of increase in leaked material. You've got to remember that the primary motivation for most leaks is that people want to influence the policy or the president when they're not otherwise able to do so. At the end of a term and in the middle of a controversy is when you can do that."

None of this means that the White House is suddenly leaking like a sieve. This is still not the most transparent institution; extracting information can be maddening at times. Just two months ago, as the Super Bowl neared, the White House refused to reveal what kind of television the president would watch it on. And in fact, many disclosures that have come out lately seem to have originated from other agencies in the administration. But it signals that the White House is no longer able to enforce its will on all corners of government quite as efficiently as it once seemed to do.

"Discipline is enforced by fear, and there's not a lot of people right now afraid of the president, politically afraid," said Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary for President Bill Clinton. "The Joint Chiefs, the Republican leadership, former aides are not worried about political retribution from the White House. They're a paper tiger."

Indeed, the toughest criticism of the Bush White House these days seems to emanate from those who were once on the inside and are no longer reluctant to speak out. Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, told the New York Times this month that he is "so disappointed in things" that he has concluded that Sen. John F. Kerry was right about Iraq. John R. Bolton left his post as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations and within weeks complained that the administration was not being tough enough on Iran and North Korea. Kenneth Adelman, a former confidant of Vice President Cheney and adviser to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, now denounces his erstwhile friends for running the worst administration in modern times.

Some of what is happening now was commonplace in past administrations. During Clinton's tenure -- and, I'm told, during those of his predecessors -- it was possible within limits to gain insight into how the White House worked. Reporters who had a question about economic policy could call the president's economic adviser, those writing on health care could call his domestic policy adviser, those with legal queries could call the counsel's office. None of those officials in the Bush White House returns reporters' calls.

In the past, it usually became known who was being considered for the Supreme Court or top administration posts long before any announcements were made. Options for welfare policy and diplomatic initiatives were effectively vetted in the media before landing on the president's desk. At times, that put Clinton's disarray on public display, but on many other occasions, it helped air dissent and further legitimize debate.

"Within reason, it's healthy for the system," Lockhart said. "You can't govern through the newspapers. But you also can't govern with six people in the room. You have to strike a balance." In the first two years of Clinton's presidency, "there was too much public argument," he added. "But by the end of the administration, the balance was pretty good."

Bush didn't think so, and he came into office determined to do things differently. Leaks, in his view, were a sign of a disorderly White House. Nothing should get out that was not supposed to get out. And his ability to make that stick through so many years suggested an unusual solidarity among his team. Bush remembered people in his father's White House coming to him as the president's son to complain that they had no access to the Oval Office. The son vowed not to repeat that management pattern and believed that by keeping an open door, there would be less incentive for aides to go to the media to be heard.

"You've got two polar extremes there," said Trent Duffy, a former Bush spokesman, comparing his White House with the previous one. "The main reason the Bush White House was able to maintain such a level of discipline was largely because they and the vice president's office were really in sync and there wasn't a lot of freelancing, versus the Clinton White House, which was the opposite."

Still, as Duffy noted, the signature disagreement of Bush's first term did eventually become public -- the struggle over the Iraq war between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on one side and Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other. The losing side in that struggle, Powell's State Department, was more likely to leak, a pattern that irritated Bush and the West Wing.

Every White House engages in strategic leaks that are planned and authorized at the top -- information placed without fingerprints to advance a particular goal or undercut a rival. Some aides in the Clinton White House kept a list of whose turn it was to receive a leak of an initiative that the president was soon to announce -- if it's Tuesday, it must be USA Today. Those sorts of meaningless 24-hour scoops were designed to maximize coverage of something the White House wanted covered on the theory that the recipient media organization would play up its "exclusive" and others would chase it.

The other kind of authorized leak can blow up on a White House, as the Bush team discovered when an attempt to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war, triggered a special counsel investigation that ultimately led to the indictment and conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

But it is the unauthorized leak that every president rails against and, in the end, finds impossible to stop. Now Bush sees it happening more often. In the past few weeks, for example, The Washington Post reported on internal e-mails sent by White House aide Elliott Abrams blasting the president's nuclear agreement with North Korea. And the New York Times detailed an effort by Rumsfeld's replacement, Robert M. Gates, to shut down Guantanamo Bay, a proposal blocked by Cheney and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Those are classic Washington stories, where debates on important issues of unquestionable public interest are aired in the open, something that might not have happened all that long ago. Duffy said that may stem from a somewhat more open environment fostered in the past year by White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and press secretary Tony Snow, who are not wedded to rote talking points.

Rather than shun the media, Snow has made a point of putting the president and top aides out for more interviews as well as off-the-record meetings with journalists. "It's obvious the White House is doing things they didn't do in the first term," Duffy said. "Tony has a totally different approach."

Snow also hasn't sweated garden-variety leaks the way others used to. After Bush recently held an unpublicized meeting with a Russian general accused of war crimes in Chechnya, a government official leaked it to Human Rights Watch, which tipped off The Post. The resulting publicity prompted the White House to disavow knowing about the general's past and to swear off any future contacts.

The Russians were annoyed. No doubt they wished the old Kremlin techniques were still in effect.

bakerp@washpost.com

Peter Baker is a Washington Post White House correspondent.

Original article here.

Freedom demands openness and transparency, a type of courage and willingness to share truth despite fear. Fascism and hegemony require secrecy, lies, closed-systems, obedience to authority, manipulation and playing on fear. We are at a crossroads as a nation. Do we choose fear or freedom?