Selective Memory of the Elite Media
Ted Folkert
July 31, 2014
How quickly our media moguls forget about the integrity, or lack thereof, of those who negotiate themselves (or stumble) into powerful foreign policy decision-making. Perhaps this helps to explain why our sad and abusive foreign policy has been soft pedaled by the press all these years. Of course, a powerful and benevolent country such as ours could do no wrong when dealing with foreign countries, even when we are forcing regime changes to meet our will or the will of some of our behemoth corporations or the whims of some of our misguided fearless leaders.
Eric Alterman, one of our leading home run hitters in the liberal media these days, has just hit another one out of the park in his Nation Magazine article: “Don’t Know Much About History.” He points out how lies, deception and corruption preceded the Vietnam and Iraq wars and now Henry Kissinger, in evading history entirely, calls them “idealistic”. Alterman states: “After all, it was “history” – which in contemporary American political culture, is another word for “irrelevant”. And it is this contempt for history, as the cliché correctly advises, that condemns our nation to continually repeat it.”’
As another example of the selective memory of the press, he points out that “Elliott Abrams is able to mouth off as a respected Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, attacking Barack Obama … as The Man Who Broke the Middle East”, as the fact is ignored that “he was disbarred in the District of Columbia for his lies to Congress about … crimes in which he participated while serving in the Reagan administration.”
“ …. How about the fact that this criminal, while serving on the National Security Council during Bush II, himself helped break the Middle East by undermining the 2006 Palestinian elections, which helped lead to the creation of a Hamas-run rump state in Gaza in the first place. Yet he somehow gets away with the crazy claim that “the Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace” in order to blame its alleged collapse on the president.”’
Alterman points out that …. “.… rehabilitations of Henry Kissinger and Elliott Abrams demonstrate, being a known liar and an arguable (Kissinger) or unarguable (Abrams) enabler of genocide is no barrier to career advancement in the American establishment, thanks to the collective amnesia of its most elite institutions, especially its elite media.”
Alterman cites other liars, such as Dick and Liz Cheney in The Weekly Standard, and William Kristol in numerous publications, stating that “as Kristol, Cheney, Abrams and Kissinger demonstrate over and over, success within our political punditocracy means never having to say you’re sorry.
Think about!
Read the article: http://www.thenation.com/article/180680/dont-know-much-about-history