![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasSo, of course, there is absolutely no case against, whassisname, John Mark Karr, who claimed to have killed whasserface . . . Jonbenet Ramsey or whatever, because he was just a pathetic guy who wanted to sound like a big shot, and everybody involved actually knew that.
I point out what I said a week and a half ago, when the story broke.
So, let's get the points out where we can see them all in a row:
1. The President's warrantless wiretapping program is declared both illegal and unconstitutional -- that is, it inherently violates constitutionally-protected due process, but it ALSO specifically breaks Federal laws. This is big, folks -- this is a court declaring that the President has committed a high crime, AND has violated his Oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
2. The Office of Homeland Security announces, entirely randomly, that they just happened to be in Thailand, and, hey, wouldn'tcha know it, here's the guy that killed JonBenet Ramsey ten years ago! It's not like we ever even suspected that the Department of Homeland Security was even LOOKING for JonBenet Ramsey's killer, but, see, apparently, there was this theory that Osama bin Laden has this thing for child beauty paegents. . .
3. The news channels react in a way that I'm having trouble coming up with a suitably biting and sarcastic metaphor for. Something like Pavlov, or shambling zombies chanting "LACK OF BRAINNNNZZZZ", or scampering after a shiny object, or "Hey, that dog has a poofy tail!" I'm really failing to come up with anything that expresses how pathetic and easily manipulated the news channels are. Nobody at the press conference appears to think of asking, "Um, by the way, Department of Homeland Security person? What are you actually DOING here?" which, to MY mind, would have been the INTERESTING story.
In any case, they dig up all their ten-year-old file photos of a tarted-up little girl and chatter on for a while.
4. There's no evidence there, and they don't even indict the guy, and drop all charges.
Do I have any PROOF that the White House manipulated the news cycle, dragged a guy's name through the dirt, fucked with a murder investigation, and used Justice Department and DHS resources to simply distract the media for a week or so until they could be distracted by something else?
No, of course I don't have proof.
But I'm not a moron, and neither are you, and I think that what happened here is pretty damned obvious.
And the thing is that it's up to US, bartenders and students and writers and programmers and exterminators and cooks and homemakers and unemployed people and the rest of us -- us folks with blogs and livejournals, just sitting here typing to put these things together. And if enough of us pathetic little nobodies sit around here in front of our pathetic little computers and keep typing away at these things which sound like pathetic conspiracy theories -- eventually the REAL media will do a story that will be like, "Oh, look at these pathetic little paranoid wankers who keep thinking that we here in the REAL media were totally duped by the White House because we went haring off to Thailand because the DHS said that they had a break in a ten year old sensationalist murder case that turned out to be totally made up, when at the same time the President was found to have been breaking the law, and we reported the made-up thing instead of the real thing, and now they say we were duped and aren't those paranoid wankers so pathetic for . . . hunh . . . wait a minute. . ."
Hey. Here's the truth. WE'RE the Fourth Estate -- you and me. Big Media? No. And really, they never were. People making lots of money from media have always been part of the power structure. But the whole "freedom of speech, freedom of the press" thing? That was always to protect you and me. If the Empire is in dire risk of catching pneumonia, it's OUR job to point out that the Emperor has no clothes -- not TimeWarner's, not CNN's, not the Wall Street Journal's.
You and me, if we pick up something interesting, like, for instance, "someone working for the President is clearly fucking with the JonBenet Ramsey case to distract us," and we start talking about it, those other guys, they'll catch on sooner or later, and they'll talk about it, and more people will hear about it.
But the fact is that it's never been the big guy who's made it his job to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." "Speaking truth to power" is done by those who have truth, never by those who have power.
Yeah. The media dropped the ball on this one. That's because it's not their fucking JOB to carry the ball -- it's ours. It's our ball, and if we want them to carry it, we have to make them WANT to carry it. And we make them WANT to carry it by talking about it. The more this shiny, shiny ball moves around, the more likely they are to go after it. "The President manipulated you, screwed you over by using a pretty little girl murder victim to distract you." That's shiny.
Catch.
I point out what I said a week and a half ago, when the story broke.
So, let's get the points out where we can see them all in a row:
1. The President's warrantless wiretapping program is declared both illegal and unconstitutional -- that is, it inherently violates constitutionally-protected due process, but it ALSO specifically breaks Federal laws. This is big, folks -- this is a court declaring that the President has committed a high crime, AND has violated his Oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
2. The Office of Homeland Security announces, entirely randomly, that they just happened to be in Thailand, and, hey, wouldn'tcha know it, here's the guy that killed JonBenet Ramsey ten years ago! It's not like we ever even suspected that the Department of Homeland Security was even LOOKING for JonBenet Ramsey's killer, but, see, apparently, there was this theory that Osama bin Laden has this thing for child beauty paegents. . .
3. The news channels react in a way that I'm having trouble coming up with a suitably biting and sarcastic metaphor for. Something like Pavlov, or shambling zombies chanting "LACK OF BRAINNNNZZZZ", or scampering after a shiny object, or "Hey, that dog has a poofy tail!" I'm really failing to come up with anything that expresses how pathetic and easily manipulated the news channels are. Nobody at the press conference appears to think of asking, "Um, by the way, Department of Homeland Security person? What are you actually DOING here?" which, to MY mind, would have been the INTERESTING story.
In any case, they dig up all their ten-year-old file photos of a tarted-up little girl and chatter on for a while.
4. There's no evidence there, and they don't even indict the guy, and drop all charges.
Do I have any PROOF that the White House manipulated the news cycle, dragged a guy's name through the dirt, fucked with a murder investigation, and used Justice Department and DHS resources to simply distract the media for a week or so until they could be distracted by something else?
No, of course I don't have proof.
But I'm not a moron, and neither are you, and I think that what happened here is pretty damned obvious.
And the thing is that it's up to US, bartenders and students and writers and programmers and exterminators and cooks and homemakers and unemployed people and the rest of us -- us folks with blogs and livejournals, just sitting here typing to put these things together. And if enough of us pathetic little nobodies sit around here in front of our pathetic little computers and keep typing away at these things which sound like pathetic conspiracy theories -- eventually the REAL media will do a story that will be like, "Oh, look at these pathetic little paranoid wankers who keep thinking that we here in the REAL media were totally duped by the White House because we went haring off to Thailand because the DHS said that they had a break in a ten year old sensationalist murder case that turned out to be totally made up, when at the same time the President was found to have been breaking the law, and we reported the made-up thing instead of the real thing, and now they say we were duped and aren't those paranoid wankers so pathetic for . . . hunh . . . wait a minute. . ."
Hey. Here's the truth. WE'RE the Fourth Estate -- you and me. Big Media? No. And really, they never were. People making lots of money from media have always been part of the power structure. But the whole "freedom of speech, freedom of the press" thing? That was always to protect you and me. If the Empire is in dire risk of catching pneumonia, it's OUR job to point out that the Emperor has no clothes -- not TimeWarner's, not CNN's, not the Wall Street Journal's.
You and me, if we pick up something interesting, like, for instance, "someone working for the President is clearly fucking with the JonBenet Ramsey case to distract us," and we start talking about it, those other guys, they'll catch on sooner or later, and they'll talk about it, and more people will hear about it.
But the fact is that it's never been the big guy who's made it his job to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." "Speaking truth to power" is done by those who have truth, never by those who have power.
Yeah. The media dropped the ball on this one. That's because it's not their fucking JOB to carry the ball -- it's ours. It's our ball, and if we want them to carry it, we have to make them WANT to carry it. And we make them WANT to carry it by talking about it. The more this shiny, shiny ball moves around, the more likely they are to go after it. "The President manipulated you, screwed you over by using a pretty little girl murder victim to distract you." That's shiny.
Catch.