Reply #33: You raise a most important point, cosmik debris. Where are the Media?

[Octafish]

The nation's Founders understood for the Republic to work, the electorate must be kept informed. Thus, the Press is the only business mentioned by name in the entire U.S. Constitution -- in the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So Bush and the BFEE have done all they can to co-opt, divert and dismantle anything to do with TRUTH.

Beating Bush at 'Information War'

By Robert Parry
March 16, 2005

Some readers have asked why I started my book about the rise of the Bush dynasty with a chapter set between the two George Bush presidencies, with Bill Clinton explaining why he didn’t pursue investigations of his predecessor’s Cold War crimes. The short answer is that I saw that moment as pivotal to understanding today’s political crisis.

The failure of the Clinton Democrats to fight for an honest record of the Cold War – and to expose George H.W. Bush’s complicity in wrongdoing – opened the door for George W. Bush to enter the White House in 2001. If key documents had been declassified about just a few scandals, such as the Iraqgate arming of Saddam Hussein and the Iran-Contra Affair, that door almost certainly would have been shut for good.

But Bill Clinton saw history as less important than, say, his health-care program, which he thought (naively) might garner some Republican support if he let the elder George Bush off the hook. So, the American people were left with a misleading Cold War history; Clinton never got his bipartisanship; and the way was cleared for a comeback by the Bushes and their neoconservative allies.

Indirectly, the decision to avoid any truth-commission-style accountability after “winning” the Cold War also contributed to the quagmire in Iraq, a budgetary ocean of red ink again at high tide, and a population that wallows more and more in myths and misinformation.

‘Information Warfare’

It is a thesis of both my new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, and my earlier book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ that Clinton and the Democrats grievously misunderstood the modern concept of “information warfare” and how the Republicans were waging it at home.

The Republicans and especially the neoconservative intellectuals realized that control of information – or one might say replacing it with propaganda – was the key to solidifying their political power within the United States.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/031505.html