Military - Industrial - Congressional - Media complex keeps us in never-ending wars

[laststeamtrain]

January 30, 2010
Baffle Them with Bull Feathers

Bull Feather Merchants discussed how fighting propaganda wars became the Pentagon’s primary mission during young Mr. Bush’s administration. This piece describes how the ubiquitous warmongery continues to manipulate American and the world into a constant state of armed conflict.

Candidate Obama stepped into a steaming pile of gotcha when he promised to "finish the job" in Afghanistan. He did so in response to heat he was taking for having voted in the Senate against the surge that turned out to be such a "success" and that, as FOX News noted, his presidential opponent "John McCain courageously fought for." The "successful surge" in Iraq has been one of the warmongery’s most successful PR ploys to date.

As official stenographer to the General David Petraeus and former journalist Thomas E. Ricks has artlessly blabbed, "King David" did, indeed, "betray us." Petraeus misled Congress and the public into believing he was trying to create conditions in Iraq "that would allow our soldiers to disengage" when he was actually creating conditions that would support the Pentagon’s Long War, a stratagem that will keep America’s military, especially its Army, engaged in low level, indecisive conflicts against numerically and technologically inferior opponents for 50 years or longer.

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The Pentagon sold Petraeus protégé McChrystal to the Senate as a counterinsurgency expert. McChrystal’s only real combat command experience involved assassinating suspected bad guys along with whatever civilians happened to be within the frag pattern at Dick Cheney’s behest. Image-makers have toiled Herculean to make Petraeus and McChrystal seem superhuman. Tom Ricks gushed like Joe Lieberman in a 2007 NPR interview as he recounted the spectacle of Petraeus besting teen-age privates in one-arm pushup contests, and McChrystal’s public relations staff made a point of ensuring the world knows that he only eats one meal a day and sleeps just a few hours a night. That should have told everyone paying attention that Petraeus’s military genius consists of penchant for staging flashy displays of chickensh**t and that McChrystal is permanently goofy from the effects of long-term malnourishment and sleep deprivation.

But these two brass-hatted humbugs know how to manipulate the media and baffle Congress and the public with bull feathers, as does Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, whose father was a high profile Hollywood publicity agent. The way they polluted the information environment to mousetrap Obama into going along with the Afghanistan surge was eye-watering. In another era — most notably the Truman administration days — an insubordinate stunt like that would have gotten Petraeus, McChrystal and Mullen transferred to Civilian Command. However, the three amigos currently at the top of the armed forces pile are connected and valued in high places, especially in the defense industry and the Congress, both of which have a vested interest in making the Long War as long as possible.

That’s the most frightening part of the recent Supreme Court ruling that allows politicians to guzzle every last drop of campaign financing that corporations can afford to pour down their throats. The ruling is an all’s-in-free for the military-industrial-congressional-media complex to keep us in never-ending counterproductive wars that we get to pay for.

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[Vidar]

1. K&R.

[MinM]

2. Larissa knocks another one outta the park ;o)

:dem: & R

[classysassy]

3. The public

feel unpatriotic if they don't support the generals and the profiteering,unpatriotic warmongers.I say to you my fellow americans,follow the money,and you'll know who is screwing us.The generals end up working for the arms industry,the congressmen and women become lobbyist for the same crooks.Its all about the$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.