U.S. Media Propagandists Rush to Take Advantage of Murder of 5 Newspaper Staffers in Annapolis, MD

In a naked pitch for public sympathy, major "news" media all over the U.S. have made the murder of five employees at an obscure local newspaper the top national story of the day for several days running.

A vicious jackass, angry over accurate reporting of his conviction for stalking a women, attacked the offices of the Capital Gazette paper in Annapolis, Maryland, and shot to death five workers and wounded six others.

U.S. establishment media of all stripes immediately went into "national grief" mode.

Let's put this in perspective.

Every day, people are murdered in the U.S. Thousands are murdered every year.

They are auto mechanics, secretaries, cashiers, air conditioner repairmen, trash collectors, accountants, construction workers, computer technicians, taxi drivers, dietitians, librarians, cooks, bank tellers... do you see where I'm going with this?

What's so special about the particular occupation, "newspaper employee"?

The establishment media feels itself under heavy assault in the Age of Trump, and feels the need to generate public sympathy for itself. Hence the saturation coverage.

The two New York City tabloid rags made it their front page story- as if it had happened in their offices.

The government-established radio propaganda network NPR (National Public Radio) waxed hysterical, with this verbiage: "the deadly shooting an attack on free speech," and it's "courageous" of the reporters at the Capital Gazette to cover the story of their colleagues deaths.

Huh? Why wouldn't they cover it? And given that the killer was immediately arrested at the scene, and denied bail, what's so damn "courageous" about reporting it? Weird assertion.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media barely makes a peep about the ongoing slaughter of journalists in Mexico, for example. Or the persecution of journalists in Turkey, who are regularly jailed on bogus "terrorism" and "coup conspiracy" charges by the autocrat who rules there, Erdogan. There are innumerable other examples of U.S. "journalists" indifference to the murder and oppression of journalists.

How about all the times the U.S. bombed the offices of Al-Jazeera? Nary a word in U.S. establishment media.

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are demonized by U.S. media and subjected to a relentless campaign by the U.S. government aimed at their destruction. WikiLeaks makes information available to the public. That is journalism!

Hey, here's another one. The U.S. government murdered U.S. journalist Michael Hastings. The attitude of the U.S. media towards that one was "good riddance."

So I find this cynical opportunism by U.S. establishment propagandists to generate sympathy for themselves disgusting. They spent 365 days cheerleading for corporate oligarchic capitalism and aiding and abetting the crimes of the U.S. state, domestic and foreign, with their lies and coverups.

They are accomplices to the murders of millions of people killed as a result of U.S. aggression and U.S. coups that install and support fascist death squad regimes. They want me to feel sorry for them because five people employed by some newspaper no one outside of Annapolis has ever heard of got killed?

Please.

American Propagandist: The Unbearable Sanctimony of Barack Hussein Obama

And hypocrisy, too.

On December 29, 2016, Obama delivered a verbal tongue-lashing to Russia over what the U.S. government and media claim is proven fact- that Russia "stole" emails from Democratic Party apparatchiks and funneled them to WikiLeaks. (This in turn prompted an establishment conspiracy theory claiming that WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange are Russian agents, conveniently ignoring the fact that WikiLeaks is set up for receiving anonymous uploads of data. But then, these are the same people who claim Edward Snowden is a "traitor" and "Russian agent" who "fled to Russia," ignoring the fact that they trapped Snowden in Moscow's airport, where he sat for six weeks, by canceling his passport while he was in transit to Latin America. Dishonestly ignoring facts in order to promulgate lies- euphemistically called "false narratives," is habitual behavior with most of the U.S. political/media elite.)

Obama said on the 29th, in announcing his initial punishment of Russia: "“The United States and friends and allies around the world must work together to oppose Russia’s efforts to undermine established international norms of behavior."

Apparently, using computer malware to sabotage Iran's centrifuges, and having your NSA spy on the personal communications of heads of state of allied nations, and engaging in economic espionage against foreign corporations, and spying on the communications of European parliamentarians en masse, and trying to steal every phone call, email, text message, Internet search, fax and everything in the whole world, is within "established international norms of behavior."

But ferreting out emails from one of the two U.S. political cartel parties, and sharing it with the world, (something that U.S. officials also do anonymously, in "leaks," actually plants, in the media), THAT is outside "established international norms of behavior."

The "norms" that the U.S. dictates, which boil down to: The U.S. Can Do Whatever It Wants, And The Rest Of You Have To Do What The U.S. Says.

Gall, nerve, chutzpah, brass- call it that. Imperialist arrogance is more to the point, however.

The only question about Obama is- to what degree is he self-brainwashed with his own guff, which makes him a hypocrite, versus his awareness of how cynical he's being. Where does Obama fall onthe hypocrisy-cynicism spectrum? Ultimately it's a minor question.

If Russia indeed revealed that useful information about the inner machinations of the venal Democratic Party and its sleazy con artists, and Hillary Clinton's "secret" speech to Goldman Sachs, more power to them. We the people who inhabit this planet, are entitled to that information. Our rulers are NOT entitled to deceive us, as they endeavor to do every single day. A side effect of the conflict between rival national regimes with an insatiable hunger for power is that occasionally things are revealed as they battle each other for tactical and strategic advantage. That's all to the good. Don't look a gifthorse in the mouth just because it's Russian.

Long Live WikiLeaks and freedom of information.

Obama tries to intimidate Putin in Stare-Down. Hangzhou, China, September 2016.

Jeffrey Toobin Is A Loathsome Liar

Jeffrey Toobin is a guy with a law degree, who occupied a perch at two important fonts of U.S. establishment propaganda: CNN, where under the guise of “legal analyst” he pushes establishment political lines, and writing in the elite haute bourgeous magazine The New Yorker since 1992. He has been part of the pack of attack dogs savaging the whistle blowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and Wikileaks leader Julian Assange. In short, he is a cog in the system of power in America whose role is to guide the thoughts of susceptible minds into the proper channels. [1]

In a New Yorker article about the prosecution of female jail guards in Baltimore who were seduced by gang member inmates and smuggled drugs to them, Toobin falsely links George Jackson, (who was murdered by California prison bosses in 1971) to this prison gang. After painting Jackson as a misogynist, using an alleged quote from Jackson's 1970 book Soledad Brother, Toobin writes, and this is an entire paragraph:

“In 1970, Jackson was charged with murdering a prison guard, allegedly in retaliation for the deaths of several inmates. [Notice, a guard is “murdered,” but inmates the guards kill aren't murdered, they just “die.” In fact, guards shot down inmates in the exercise yard from guard towers in deliberate assassinations of “radical” inmates. Toobin can't even bother to say how many inmates were murdered, just “several.”] The following year, while awaiting trial, he pulled a smuggled gun from beneath a wig and took several guards hostage. In the chaos that followed two inmates and three guards died in Jackson's cell block, and Jackson was killed in the prison yard.” [2]

That's all Toobin has to say about that. I was flabbergasted to read this, since it was a surprise to see this long ago discredited piece of California state propaganda pop up years later as fact. It is tantamount to Toobin repeating the New York State lie that the Attica inmates who rebelled murdered and castrated the guards they had taken prisoner (the guards were shot dead by New York State Police and National Guardsmen who stormed the prison, and were not castrated). What happened then was the story was immediately exposed as preposterous. The gun the state claimed Jackson hid under a wig was way too large to be hidden on top of someone's head under a wig. When this was pointed out, the state came up with a different, smaller gun, and said that was the gun. Still impossible, absurd, as was the very idea that Jackson, closely supervised when transported from his cell to other parts of the prison, could have somehow obtained a gun, and a wig, and worn the wig without the guards noticing, with a gun “hidden” under it. What became quite clear in short order was that Jackson had been assassinated, although apparently it didn't go so smoothly. A committed revolutionary, Jackson had survived numerous previous attempts on his life. This all occurred in the context of the war on the Black Panther Party, which made Jackson a member in prison based on his writings and renown. The wig and gun story was just a pathetic cover story that fell apart as soon as it was touched.

The vaunted, renowned, storied, stuff-of-legend New Yorker “fact-checking department” seems to do fact-checking more like you'd expect at the Soviet-era Pravda. Not reliable or trustworthy, and elevating ideology over truth, intellectual and moral integrity, and honesty.

Smug and well-fed in his highly paid, comfortably conformist role, Toobin takes satisfaction in the imprisonment and suffering of heroes like Manning, and ardently hopes for the same for Ed Snowden. “Liberal” defender of the total surveillance state, Toobin thinks NSA surveillance of everything and everyone is no big deal.

1] You can experience a sample of this loathsome toad in action, “debating” with Glenn Greenwald and James Risen, “Glenn Greenwald on Piers Morgan On XKEYSCORE Greenwald OWNS Toobin AGAIN!”

2] “Letter From Baltimore,” “This Is My Jail: Where gang members and their female guards set the rules.” The New Yorker, 4/14/14.