by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Gandhi once said that western civilization would be “a good idea.” So would black journalism. One white TV talking head said he was ready to arrest Glen Greenwald. Not to be outdone, MSNBC’s black talking heads too, are ready to personally scalp Wikileaks and put the cuffs on Edward Snowden. Public opinion, which favored Snowden early, has to be pushed in the administration’s direction. A dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

The second amendment of the US Constitution guarantees “freedom of the press,” not so that government can tell us what to believe, but so that citizens can publicly receive and transmit to each other news and information about what the powerful are doing, and perhaps what they ought to do about it. Journalism is the only profession with its own constitutional amendment. But just as wealthy corporations and individuals have captured regulatory agencies, whole state legislatures, governors’ mansions, the courts, the White House and Congress, they own the media too, and what passes for journalism.

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What passes for “journalism” these days is reporters and talking TV heads who uncritically transmit the sayings of anonymous corporate, military and government officials as news, while competing with each other to discourage, defame and denounce real reporters and their sources. Thanks to the elite “diversity” of the Obama Era black America, once the stronghold of anti-authoritarian suspicion, is bombarded with attractive brown faces in elite places, faces who try to leverage the cultural and moral authority of African America to the soulless and bankrupt business of empire.

Two of the biggest names in the corporate stable nowadays are Joy-Ann Reid and Melissa Harris-Perry. Both are part of the Comcast-MSNBC plantation, and are earning their pay this month howling for the scalps of real journalists and their sources.

MSNBC talking head Joy-Ann Reid played the part of prosecutor, not reporter in a June 29 interview with Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson.

JR: “…Obviously the most important question…. is Edward Snowden still holed up in the Moscow airport?”

KH: “I can’t reveal his exact location or his travel plans.”

JR: “The Russians have revealed his exact location. They said he was in the Moscow airport. Wikileaks is paying for his travel. Do you guys not know where he is?

KH: “We of course know where he is. We do have a hand in paying for his travel from Hong Kong to Moscow, that is correct.

JR: “If he were to travel on to the next country, he’s half indicated he wants to go to South America, Wikileaks would pay for that too?”

KH: “That remains to be seen.”

JR: “But if you didn’t pay for it, who would? Isn’t Wikileaks providing him with legal counsel? Someone traveling with him?”

KH: “There is a legal aide on his behalf traveling with him. He has access to persons on our legal team and we did connect our legal team with his legal advisors.”

JR: “Who’s paying for those legal advisors?”

KH: “Our legal advisers? Some we are paying ourselves and some are working pro bono.”

JR: “I wonder if there was money from — there is an organization that raises money for Wikileaks – Freedom of the Press Foundation – . is that organization involved in paying for Mr. Snowden’s travel?”

KH: “The money that we have access to comes from various sources. One is the Freedom of the Press Foundation. We have a fund in France as well that’s collecting money on our behalf. despite the banking block on us. We have funds in Iceland from (the period) prior to the banking blockade against the organization.”

JR: “I ask that question because two journalists obviously Mr. Snowden gave some of the leaked information to are on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Were you aware of that when Wikileaks began paying for his travel?”

KH: “I was aware of their position on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, yes.”

JR: “I want to get you to react to something Lonnie Snowden, Mr. Snowden’s father, said. He essentially said ‘I don’t want him to put him in peril,’ meaning his son, ‘but i am concerned about those who surround him. I think Wikileaks if you look at its past history you know that the focus is not necessarily on the constitution of the United States, it’s simply to release as much information as possible.’ What’s your reaction to that?”

KH: “I think Mr. Snowden senior has been rather ill-informed by mainstream media in this country and he has no accurate information about the organization. We are concerned about human rights. We are concerned about the freedom of speech and –”

JR: “But he mentioned the U.S. Constitution.”

KH: “Where the U.S. Constitution pertains to these issues we would support the U.S. Constitution.”

JR: “Let me ask you whether or not Edward Snowden was ill-informed about Wikileaks in 2009. When he was in a chat room overseas he essentiall accused the New York Times – we’re gonna put up the graphic – that was his screen name. ‘thetruehooha’ he was calling himself, he was talking about a previous leak in a January 10, 2009 report that President Bush turned down a request from Israelis for bunker busting bombs that it wanted to use to attack iran’s main nuclear site. he put up ‘wtf, new york times, are they trying to start a war? Jesus Christ, they’re like Wikileaks.’ Then he talked about anonymous sources, he said those people should be shot in the chicarrones. Was he essentially ill-informed as well when he said essentially ‘the New York Times’ was like Wikileaks in a bad way for leaking information?”

KH: “It has not been confirmed this is actually from Mr. Snowden.”

JR: “Actually, it has been confirmed.”

KH: “If so, he’s obviously changed his position in 2009 and every person should be allowed to change his opinion in a positive way as he has done.”

JR: “I want to open it up to the panel. one of the additional countries added to the potential country hopping that Mr. Snowden is doing is Venezuela which has said they’d gladly accept Mr. Snowden. So now we have a trifecta of countries that might not be the most savory, in addition to Ecuador.”

At this point, Melissa Harris Perry, Reid’s fellow Comcast-MSNBC talking head jumps in. If Reid has played the prosecutor thus far grilling Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, Harris-Perry played the bad historian and hostile cop in a free form diatribe against whistleblower Edward Snowden.

MHP: “I am constantly shocked by this story over the course of the week in that we have clearly an international group of people who are providing resources to keep someone who’s broken American law from having to stand for justice in this country…

“The level of sort of privilege associated with such a discourse suggests that we should not be taking this seriously. I wonder if we’re even taking it seriously enough, the idea that this individual, who as far as I can tell his opinion has changed, primarily to save his own skin. It seems clear to me that his willing to take refuge in countries whose stand on public information, on human rights is in fact worse than the United States of America, for whom I have many important critiques. And yet the idea that the human rights violations in China, in Venezuela, in Ecuador, in Russia would somehow be less relevant to him is clearly simply because he’s only saving his own skin.

“In this country those who have decided to take a position of civil disobedience, because they love and care about their country and want to extend the constitution have always done so with a recognition that doing so also means standing for the consequences of breaking those laws and when they have done that, they have changed the country. But this going on the run thing? This is different. this is dangerous to our nation.”

JR: “And I want to clarify, the Venezuelan president Nicholas Medoro said his government would almost certainly grant Mr. Snowden asylum if he should apply. Do you want to respond to Melissa’s point?”

KH: “I think she has to think a little bit more about the Constitution. As I understand the Constitution and what is at stake here, I have a reflection back to the Nixon era when President Nixon sat in the infamous interview with David Frost when he said well when the president does it, it means that it is not illegal [10]. That is the issue –”

At this point, the heads of both prosecutor Reid and tough cop Harris-Perry simultaneously imploded. They both lost it, unintelligibly shouting over each other for more than ten seconds. After they stopped shouting, Hrafsson tried to say the issue was the substance of Snowden’s revelations, that the US government was illegally collecting, literally every email, text message, phone call, facebook post and electronic brain fart on the planet and storing it for future data-mining reference. Bad cop Harris-Perry would have none of it, angrily declaring that the issues were Snowden’s illegitimacy, because he won’t turn himself in, and his possible contact with foreign countries who might mean “to do us harm.”

Prosecutor Reid replied to the Nixon quote with unintentional irony, asserting that Snowden didn’t reveal any illegal behavior, because of course the government had done nothing illegal, and as host, ended the segment.

The camera cut away quickly, maybe so we couldn’t see the Wikileaks guy laughing.

A day or two later Harris-Perry channeled the cop again, with a Snowden segment on her own show. Harris-Perry insisted from her comfy TV chair, that any whistleblower or dissenter who failed to meekly submit to whatever punishment authorities deign to mete out is illegitimate at least, possibly self-serving as well, though just how the self is served in such cases was unclear. She brought up Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, the state senator who filibustered in Texas, and the folks who get arrested for “Moral Mondays” in North Carolina every week, and later in the show, Dan Ellsberg..

Harris-Perry might be a bright professor, but on TV she’s a lousy cop and a worse historian.

Nelson Mandela was on the run for years, a fugitive inside and outside South Africa, before being caught. The ANC maintained camps and facilities in African countries neighboring South Africa quite openly during the last decade or two of the apartheid regime, while receiving substantial aid from many African countries and most notably from the Soviet Union. They got none from the United States, by the way. Martin Luther King was arrested many but usually refused bail for a day or two while the press and religious leaders successfully clamored for his release. Dr. King never faced the prospect of felony time except once, briefly, for breaking a silly law against boycotting. King’s longest stretch in jail was 11 days, during which he was allowed to write a short book, Letters From a Birmingham Jail, while receiving phone calls and interviews from people around the world.

Daniel Ellsberg was released on bond after no more than a day or two in custody, and the “Moral Monday” folks are typically booked for disorderly conduct or some such trivial offense.

None of that compares with the way the US treats political dissidents, and even suspected political dissidents today. Bradley Manning has been confined almost 3 years, the entire first year naked and in solitary confinement, no letters, no interviews, no phone calls, no writing materials, and a gag order slapped on his lawyers. What’s a gag order mean? It means you can’t talk about the case publicly or privately, sometimes that you can’t tell an outsider the defendant says “happy irthday” to so-and-so. Veteran civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart is about to die in a federal prison for transmitting an innocuous public message from a defendant convicted of terrorism.

King was allowed to write a book in prison. Iman Jamil Al Amin, who as H. Rap Brown led SNCC and risked his life to start freedom schools, organize co-ops and register voters in rural Alabama was finally framed for the shooting of a deputy in Atlanta. To keep him from family and other Georgia prisoners, he was moved to federal custody and is now in an underground supermax cell half a continent away in Colorado, allowed one phone call and one letter to family per month. California prisoners found with just the name — not his books, just the scrawled name — of Black Panther leader George Jackson or other political items are classified as “gang members” and placed in automatic solitary confinement for the remainder of their sentences, which may also be lengthened due to that classification.

This ain’t the sixties. Snowden won’t get bond any more than Manning has. If captured he may face life imprisonment. The government has done all it can to limit public access to Bradley Manning’s trial, has gagged his lawyers and prohibited contact with the outside, so it’s reasonable to assume they’ll do the same to Snowden. When Harris-Perry remarked, “hey, it’s not like we’re gonna waterboard him…” her mostly passive guests finally balked, reminding her as meekly as possible that the US DOES torture, and more.

Amazingly, Harris-Perry declared that

“…At this point, if he’s arrested, with all the public view on him (the likelihood of) something particularly bad happening to him is very low… we give a lot of this information to google and other sort of organizations that have no democratic elect — I mean I get the fear of big government, I truly do, but I guess I don’t quite understand why we’re so pissed that our democratic government, for which we assume there’s at least some sort of check, have information that we willingly give away to private corporations that we know have no check…”

After that she tried to lead the discussion away from Snowden, the NSA and government wrongdoing back to the safe and familiar liberal territory of blaming Bush, Republicans, and the Patriot Act, without mentioning that her president has twice extended the Patriot Act in the White House and voted for it in the Senate before that, but only after originally campaigning for the US Senate against it. I won’t bore you with how that went, check out the video yourself below, or at http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46979745/#52350212 [11]

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So why is Joy-Ann Reid trying to indict Wikileaks? Why does Melissa Harris-Perry want to personally slap the cuffs on Ed Snowden? Because they’re climbers in the diversity-riddled sphere of corporate media, which always has room for black spokespeople willing to tow the corporate and government lines. It’s their job, they’re well paid, and they know nobody’s career has ever suffered for sucking up to a president. Having talking heads, especially black and female ones, to hammer home this line every time people of color turn on the TV looking for our reflected selves, is massively important. Public opinion, including black public opinion has to be moved, consent has to be engineered.

When the NSA news broke in early June, polls indicated that more Americans thought Snowden was a hero than a traitor. As Snowden himself has pointed out, the government isn’t afraid of him or Wilileaks. It’s afraid of the people. Corporate media exist to substitute themselves for genuine civic conversation. Branded and approved black TV and radio personalities, from Oprah to Jay-Z to Prosecutor Reid and Bad Cop Melissa are not on TV to represent the race. Prosecutor Reid and Bad Cop Melissa are here to tell black people what to think, what not to think and how not to think it, and being black (like the president) they give lazy liberals the excuse to embrace empire as well.

Only time will tell whether or how well they succeed.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/joy-ann-reid-melissa-harris-perry-prosecutor-cop-go-after-snowden-wikileaks-second-amendment

pointed out on HuffPo, isn’t Sorkin the guy who’s always bragging about how close he is to top bankers and parroting their views on things? This is a man who admitted, in print, that he only went down to Zucotti Park after a bank C.E.O. asked him, “Is this Occupy thing a big deal?”

(Sorkin’s reassuring response: “As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger . . .”)

And when Senator Carl Levin’s report about Goldman’s “Big Short” and deals like Abacus and Timberwolf came out, it was Sorkin who released a lengthy screed in Dealbook defending Goldman, one I instantly recognized as being nearly indistinguishable from the excuses I’d heard from Goldman’s own P.R. people.

But the biggest clue that Sorkin’s take on Greenwald was no accident came in the rest of that same Squawk Box appearance (emphasis mine):

I feel like, A, we‘ve screwed this up, even letting him get to Russia. B, clearly the Chinese hate us to even let him out of the country.

I would arrest him . . . and now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who’s the journalist who seems to want to help him get to Ecuador.

We? Wow. That’s a scene straight out of Malcolm X. (“What’s the matter, boss, we sick?”) As a journalist, when you start speaking about political power in the first person plural, it’s pretty much glue-factory time.

The irony of all of this is that this whole discussion is taking place in a phony “debate” that’s now being cooked up about the legitimacy of advocacy journalism, which is exactly what Sorkin practices when he goes down to Zucotti Park on behalf of a bank CEO or when he talks about how “we” screwed up, letting Snowden out of the country. Preposterously, they’ve made the debate about Glenn Greenwald, who absolutely does practice advocacy journalism. But to pretend he’s the only one is lunacy.

All journalism is advocacy journalism. No matter how it’s presented, every report by every reporter advances someone’s point of view. The advocacy can be hidden, as it is in the monotone narration of a news anchor for a big network like CBS or NBC (where the biases of advertisers and corporate backers like GE are disguised in a thousand subtle ways), or it can be out in the open, as it proudly is with Greenwald, or graspingly with Sorkin, or institutionally with a company like Fox.

But to pretend there’s such a thing as journalism without advocacy is just silly; nobody in this business really takes that concept seriously. “Objectivity” is a fairy tale invented purely for the consumption of the credulous public, sort of like the Santa Claus myth. Obviously, journalists can strive to be balanced and objective, but that’s all it is, striving.

Try as hard as you want, a point of view will come forward in your story. Open any newspaper from the Thirties or Forties, check the sports page; the guy who wrote up the box score, did he have a political point of view? He probably didn’t think so. But viewed with 70 or 80 years of hindsight, covering a baseball game where blacks weren’t allowed to play without mentioning the fact, that’s apology and advocacy. Any journalist with half a brain knows that the biases of our time are always buried in our coverage.

Like many others, in my career I decided early on that I’d rather be out in the open about my opinions, and let readers know what my biases are to the extent that I can. I recognize, however, that there’s value in the other kind of reporting, where papers like the Times strive to take personal opinions out of the coverage and shoot for a “Just the facts, Ma’am” style. The value there is that people trust that approach, and readers implicitly enter into a contract with the newspaper or TV station that takes it, assuming that the organization will honestly try to show all points of view dispassionately.

Some organizations do a great job of that, but others often violate that contract, and carefully choose which “Just facts” to present and which ones to ignore, so as to put certain political or financial interests in a better light. But that doesn’t mean the approach per se is illegitimate. It’s just different.

What’s frightening now is that we suddenly have talk from people who ought to know better, not only advancing the childish lie that Glenn Greenwald and his ilk are the world’s only advocacy journalists, but also that the legitimacy of such journalists is even in question.

Gregory, I later found out, shamelessly went there in his exchange with Greenwald, saying, “Well, the question of who’s a journalist may be up to a debate with regards to what you’re doing.”

But even crazier was a subsequent Washington Post article, also cited by Cohen, entitled “On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become something other than a reporter?” The article was unintentionally comic and surrealistic because despite writer Paul Farhi’s above-the-fray tone, the mere decision to write such a piece is a classic demonstration of the aforementioned brand of hidden-bias, non-advocacy advocacy.

I mean, why not write exactly the same piece, but ask whether Andrew Ross Sorkin or David Gregory in this scandal has become something other than a reporter? One could make exactly the same argument using the behaviors of those two as the hook. The editorial decision to make it about Glenn was therefore a major piece of advocacy, despite the “agnostic” language employed in the piece (straight-news editors love the term “agnostic” and hilariously often think it applies to them, when in fact they usually confine their doubts to permitted realms of thought).

The Post piece was full of the usual chin-scratching claptrap about whether it’s appropriate for journalists to have opinions, noting that “the line between journalism – traditionally, the dispassionate reporting of facts – and outright involvement in the news seems blurrier than ever.”

This is crazy – news organizations are always involved in the news. Just ask the citizens of Iraq, who wouldn’t have spent the last decade in a war zone had every TV network in America not credulously cheered the White House on when it blundered and bombed its way into Baghdad on bogus WMD claims. Ask Howard Dean, whom I watched being driven literally bonkers by the endless questions posed by “dispassionate” reporters about whether or not he was “too left” or “too strident” to be president, questions they were being spoon-fed in bars along the campaign trail late at night by Democratic Party hacks who resented the fact that Dean went through outside channels (i.e. the Internet) to get campaign funding, and in his speeches was calling out the Dems’ pathetic cave-in on the Iraq issue.

Even worse was this quote in the Post piece from a University professor:

Edward Wasserman, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school, said having a “social commitment” doesn’t disqualify anyone from being a journalist. But the public should remain skeptical of reporters who are also advocates. “Do we know if he’s pulling his punches or has his fingers on the scale because some information that he should be reporting doesn’t fit [with his cause]?” Wasserman asked in an interview. “If that’s the case, he should be castigated.”

Wasserman, the piece pointed out, noted that he hadn’t seen such cause for alarm in Greenwald’s case. But even so, his opinion is astonishing. We should be skeptical of reporters who are advocates, because they might be pulling punches to advance a cause?

Well . . . that’s true. But only if we’re talking about all reporters, because all reporters are advocates. If we’re only talking about people like Glenn Greenwald, who are open about their advocacy, that’s a crazy thing to say. People should be skeptical of everything they read. In fact, people should be more skeptical of reporters who claim not to be advocates, because those people are almost always lying, whether they know it or not.

The truly scary thing about all of this is that we’re living in an age where some very strange decisions are being made about who deserves rights, and who doesn’t. Someone shooting at an American soldier in Afghanistan (or who is even alleged to have done so) isn’t really a soldier, and therefore isn’t really protected by the Geneva Conventions, and therefore can be whisked away for life to some extralegal detention center. We can kill some Americans by drone attacks without trial because they’d ceased to have rights once they become enemy combatants, a determination made not collectively but by some Star Chamber somewhere.

Some people apparently get the full human-rights coverage; some people on the other end aren’t really 100 percent people, so they don’t.

That’s what makes this new debate about Greenwald and advocacy journalism so insidious. Journalists of all kinds have long enjoyed certain legal protections, and those protections are essential to a functioning free press. The easiest way around those protections is simply to declare some people “not journalists.” Ten years ago, I would have thought the idea is crazy, but now any journalist would be nuts not to worry about it. Who are these people to decide who’s a journalist and who isn’t? Is there anything more obnoxious than a priesthood?

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I don’t have a weak stomach, but I confess that watching TV news does get me nauseated. So I do so sparingly. I have of course been following the coverage of the Edward Snowden story, just to see how opinion is being shaped.

In the days immediately after June 5, when Snowden revealed that the U.S. government daily collects mega-data of all phone call records in the U.S. and beyond, the cable news networks seemed puzzled about how to deal with the story.

They couldn’t very well denounce Snowden out of hand, lest they be accused of being shameless lackeys of the state (even though that’s in fact what they are). They all like to posture as “fair and balanced,” so they did initially pose the question: is Snowden a hero, or a villain?

Early opinion polls showed considerable support for Snowden’s action; a Time poll released June 13 showed 54% of those surveyed in the U.S. thought he’d done the right thing. Some unlikely people (Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck) called Snowden a “hero.” But that may be changing, as the networks now compete with one another to generate outrage—not at the spying, mind you, but at Snowden for violating the law. O’Reilly’s current position is that while a hero, Snowden should be placed on trial and judged by a jury. Which is to say, he should be apprehended abroad, brought back in handcuffs and treated to the same benefits of the U.S. judicial system enjoyed by a Bradley Manning or a Guantanamo detainee.

He broke the law! He told us: “Any analyst at any time can target anyone.”

“He took an oath,” thunders Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (and thus someone complicit in the spying programs). What she means by this is that he broke his pledge, made when he became an employee of the CIA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton—which helps handle the massive effort to monitor all of us daily—to conceal any secrets he obtained as an employee. She is of course not referring to the oath he made at the same time, to uphold the Constitution of the United States, which says very clearly that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”

Snowden has not merely revealed that the U.S. government has forced service providers Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple to share all their records with itself, in the form of mega-data that can only be accessed for content following the issuance of warrants from (secret) courts, in order to thwart real or imagined terrorist plots.

He hasn’t merely shown that the NSA intercepts 1.7 billion electronic records every day (in order, of course, to thwart the terrorists). He has charged the following:

“Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”

He is referring to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of employees of the state security apparatus. (The numbers are of course secret.)

That was and is the main story. Obama may say, “No one is listening to your phone calls,” and acknowledge, now that Snowden has come forward, that the government “merely” has available for perusal (following clandestine court procedures that secretly authorize such inspection) all of your telecommunications addresses and locations, all of your email and online contacts, lists of all the sites you visit online such that an analyst may sit at his desk with this comprehensive picture of your life but no access to the content of your communications. That’s bad enough.

But Snowden indicates that those with that power can indeed gain access to what Bill Clinton recently called the “meat” of your communications. That is, every word you’ve spoken on the phone recently, or maybe for several years; or test-messaged or instant-messaged online; can be accessed by government “analysts” at their whim.

Now why should this bother anybody? A virtual industry of bloggers has mushroomed overnight, people boasting, in the wake of Snowden’s revelations, that they have nothing to hide. Why should anybody not doing wrong be concerned?

Well, recall how, in 2008, ABC News revealed that National Security Agency staffers enjoyed monitoring satellite phone sex involving U.S. officers in Iraq. It’s worth quoting at length.

“‘These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,’ said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as ‘personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.’ […]

Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

‘Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,’ said Faulk. […]

‘Hey, check this out,’ Faulk says he would be told, ‘there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy,’ Faulk told ABC News.”

If that’s the way NSA analysts could deal with U.S. military officers in Iraq—fellow cogs in the system, fighting on behalf of U.S. imperialism—how much respect do you suppose they have for you and your privacy? For your security from their searches, their violations?

But the main issue is not your protection from phone-sex interlopers, but protection from those who want to do you harm. The FBI’s “Counterintelligence Program” (COINTELPRO), active from 1956 to 1971, collected information through wiretaps and other means with the specific objective of destroying civil rights and left-wing organizations. One of its stated missions was to use surveillance on activists to release negative personal information to the public to discredit them. In many instances the agents succeeded, and they ruined lives. And their abilities to do so pale in comparison with the abilities of Obama’s NSA.

Tens of Thousands of Spooks, with Access to Your Data

Snowden says that his personal history should not be the issue in the media, but rather his revelations. Certainly this is true. But his history is a part of this story. It shows that the monitoring of personal communications is so vast, requiring so much labor power, that those overseeing it enlist even high school dropouts without formal academic credentials to do what they do.

(I do not mention this out of any disrespect for Snowden. On the contrary, I think he’s obviously highly intelligent and plainly very competent at his former job. One can question the wisdom, judgment and political consciousness of Snowden at  age 21, when he joined the Army as a Special Forces recruit thinking he’d fight in Iraq, as he put it,  “to help free people from oppression,” or his subsequent involvement with the CIA. But I think he’s extremely bright, and more than that, at this point in his life, a real moral exemplar.)

What I mean is that the demand for “analysts” in this data-collecting apparatus is so vast that those running it are surely signing on some people who have excellent computer skills but little understanding of anything else, are control-freaks, bigots, voyeurs (like those referenced above)… And they have ready access to your information.

Just as one example of ignorance within this stratum: after 9/11 a friend of mine was visited by FBI agents inquiring about a recent computer game purchase. She and her husband answered all the questions posed, but she was astounded by the agents’ lack of sophistication.  They asked where the couple was from; India, they replied. “Is that a Muslim country?” they were asked. My friend was both intimidated and amused by the visit. She’d assumed U.S. intelligence personnel would have some basic grasp of geography and history.

Imagine such people accessing your personal information with impunity, thinking, well, here’s a reason to investigate—and doing it even if only just to pass (well-paid) time at their desks?

Remember the “Information Awareness Office” under Admiral John Poindexter, set up by a mysterious agency in the Defense Department in January 2002, and its creepy “Total Information Awareness” program?  The one with the weird icon of an eye atop a pyramid, staring down at the planet, illuminating the Greater Middle East? That was specifically advertized as a body to gather personal information on everybody in the country—phone records, emails, medical records, credit card records, etc.—so that all this could be made immediately available to law officials when required and without warrants. It generated unease, even during that period in which the Bush-Cheney administration was systematically using fear to justify all kinds of repressive measures. It was defunded by Congress the following year. But the mentality remained, and Congress notwithstanding, the machinery of “total” surveillance obviously grew, along with the culture of secrecy.

In 2004 there were reports, citing Russian intelligence, that the former East German spy chief Markus Wolf had been hired as a consultant by U.S. Homeland Security. I have not found confirmation of them (and Wolf is now dead.) But I thought at the time it was entirely plausible that the Bush administration would be willing to learn a thing or two about domestic spying from the experts of the former Stasi. What ruling elite has ever gained more total information awareness about its citizens than the old German Democratic Republic?  And done it with such elegant legal scaffolding?

Legal, Like East Germany

As historians such as Katherine Pence and Paul Betts have shown, the GDR authorities operated within scrupulously observed legal constraints. One sees this in the film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) produced in the reunited Germany in 2006. It depicts the surveillance culture of the former East Germany, leaving the viewer nauseated. As it happens, the protagonist, a popular writer and regime loyalist named Georg Dreyman, is subjected to meticulous surveillance. His home is thoroughly bugged; an agent reports on his conversations, visitors, love-making, etc. He is never charged with anything nor punished. At one point his apartment is raided on a suspicion that he’s authored an article critical of the GDR published in the west. He cooperates politely; nothing is found; the authorities leave money for the repair of furniture they’d torn up. Everything according to law.

I thought of that film while reading the lead Boston Globe editorial on June 13. It concludes that the “policies that [Snowden revealed], however objectionable, are properly authorized” while Snowden himself “broke the law.” Thus, you see, he’s not a whistle-blower but a criminal. The editors call for him to be placed on trial, as do virtually all mainstream journalists. I should not be shocked, but it is quite amazing to see Keith Olbermann’s successor, MSNBC’s “progressive” Ed Schultz join the crowd, labeling Snowden a “punk” and lawbreaker. (Chris Hayes however remains, somewhat timidly, pro-Snowden.)

The message to the masses is: How dare Mr. Snowden tell the people that they are virtually naked in the eyes of the state, that the  U.S. of A. has become one huge airport body-scanner! Because in so doing he betrays state secrets, and helps the terrorists who will now take more precautions to escape surveillance.

And how dare he tell the Chinese that Tsinghua University and the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet have been hacked by the NSA, even as the U.S. has accused the Chinese of hacking (in all likelihood, in response to U.S. actions, and less effective, and on a smaller scale)!  How dare he consort with the “enemy”!

U.S. to World: “You Must View Snowden as a Criminal, and Give Him Back”

Suddenly, the Cold War has reappeared. Snowden is charged withespionage, some of his critics alleging that he’s in the service of the PRC and/or Russia or other “enemies.” It in fact appears that Beijing and Moscow both were taken by surprise by this episode, and that both have attempted to handle Snowden’s unexpected presence carefully to avoid annoying the U.S.

But how should they respond to Washington’s logic, thoroughly embraced by the TV talking heads? “Look,” says the U.S. State Department, expecting the world to cower and obey. “This man has been charged with felonies. We’ve gone through the legal process, through treaties we have with other countries, to have him appropriately returned to face justice. We’ve revoked his passport, so he can’t legally travel, except to be returned to the U.S. So damn it, do the right thing. Turn him over!”

That’s supposed to be convincing? The media’s complaining of Russian “defiance.” Senator Chuck Schumer appeared on some show suggesting that Putin never misses an opportunity to “poke America in the eye” (referring no doubt to Russian refusal to cooperate in “regime change” in Syria, and refusal to toe the U.S.-Israeli line on Iran). But imagine if a Russian in the U.S. revealed to a U.S. paper that Putin had a massive surveillance program, and Putin demanded his immediate extradition for breaking Russian law? How would the U.S. public react?

Kerry’s talking tough. He’s demanding that Putin not allow Snowden to fly out the country (presumably to Ecuador via Cuba). His tough talk might explain the reported fact that Snowden missed his planned Monday flight out of Moscow. (Might he have threatened to force the Aeroflot plane to land in the U.S.?)

It all, in my humble opinion, boils down to this. The entirety of the ruling elite and the journalistic establishment are keen on defending the programs Snowden has exposed; keen on punishing him for his whistle-blowing; determined to vilify him as a punk, narcissist, egoist, attention-hungry ne’er-do-well (anything but a thoughtful man who made a moral choice that has enlightened people about the character of the U.S. government); feverishly working on damage control while anticipating more damning revelations; and determined to get those four laptops with their incriminating content back into the bosom of the national security state.

What sort of state is it, that says to its own people, we can invade a country based on lies, kill a million people, hold nobody accountable but hey, when one of us does something so abominable as to reveal that the state spies constantly on the people of the world, we have to have a “manhunt” for him and punish him for treason?

The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has the audacity to tell NBC News, “It is literally gut-wrenching to see” Snowden’s revelations… because of the “damage” they do to “our intelligence capabilities”! As though there were really an “our” or “us” at this point. As though we were a nation united, including the mindful watchers and the grateful watched.

No, there are us, and there are them. The tiny power elite that controls the mainstream press and cable channels, the corporations that dutifully hand over mega-data to the state (and then deny doing so to allay consumer outrage), the twin political parties, are sick to their stomachs that they’ve been so exposed.

We in our turn should feel, if not terrorized, nauseated.

GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

(Optional Video Accompaniment to This Post)

Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, of course, is what Leonard Bernstein would have produced had he conducted the Concerts For Young Bonobos on public television.

Welcome, everyone, to Versailles. Eat the finest food. Drink the finest wines. Jostle for a place at court. Bestow upon yourself an estate on the far Vineyard by the sea. Throw coins and scraps of food to the peasants from the balconies. Dance, monkey, dance.

GREGORY: To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movement, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?    

OK. I don’t have as much of a problem with this question per se as a lot of people do, inartfully phrased though it is. Glenn Greenwald had to know it was coming in some form and, surely, the thought of prosecution has to have crossed his mind, since he’s written extensively about it, and I think that anyone who is campaigning for an open society and a free debate on anything should welcome any question, no matter how hostile. And, in addition, to the roaring cheers of the dozens of people who still watch this mess, the Dancin’ Master’s open display of public foofery gave Greenwald a chance to plant him 15 rows deep into the bleachers.

Every actual journalist at NBC should spit every time David Gregory walks by. Hell, the janitorial staff should spit as he walks by, but that would simply be making more work for themselves, so I guess they won’t. As someone who’s career has straddled the Big Ditch between the old media and the new, I will grant you that the definition of who’s a journalist has become rather fluid over the past few decades. Whatever you may think of Glenn Greenwald — and, Jesus, he makes it tough sometimes — what he’s doing with Edward Snowden is journalism by any definition anyone ever proposed for it. (He’s arranging logistical help for an important source? Newspapers used to do that with some regularity. It’s even an important plot point in both the greatest newspaper movie ever made (His Girl Friday) and in the second-greatest newspaper movie ever made — Deadline USA with Humphrey Bogart.) Meanwhile, let us recall that a former chief of staff for Dick Cheney testified under oath in the Scooter Libby trial that MTP was that White House’s preferred launching pad for arrant bullshit. Let us recall the marvelous quote the late, sainted Tim Russert gave to Bill Moyers in which he said he’d wished “somebody had called him” to warn him that we were being lied into a war. Under the Dancin’ Master, the show has devolved further into being a playground for the courtier press. Maybe we do need a new definition of what journalism is. But, whatever new definition emerges, it shouldn’t be developed by the host of Meet The Fking Press, which is no more “journalism” than Duck Dynasty is a nature program.

This was a career defining moment. It’s rare that someone reveals himself quite as clearly as the Dancin’ Master does in that little by-play. He will “debate” who is or is not a journalist, and the rest of us can wait under the balcony and wait for scraps. The clearly batty Peggy Noonan is a journalist, but Glenn Greenwald may not be.  Journalism has sickened itself with respectability, debilitated itself with manners, crippled itself with politesse, and David Gregory may well be Patient Zero for all of this. As my Irish grandmother used to say, mother of god, who the hell is he when he’s at home?

That was the big moment of the weekend by far. But there were some other, lovely highlights. Over on CBS, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions eagerly informed former Akkadian cavalry embed Bob Schieffer that any bipartisan attempt to pass an immigration-reform bill would be just a matter of handing out free frijoles for votes.

(Isn’t he so cuuuutte? Really, that part is adorable.)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, that was the government of Hong Kong putting out that statement. Are you confident that we have not broken the laws of Hong Kong?

So let me put, first of all, the prime directive on the table.

(Good. Starfleet Command is in charge now. I feel better.)

(Why not? Nobody ever says no.)

In the minimization procedures that I think were leaked earlier this week, talk about the responsibilities that we have now have with respect to those U.S. persons. And we follow those. We train our people how to do this right.

(Prove that. Oops, sorry. You can’t. Virtue is itself secret.)

(Stop it. You’re killing me. Really.)

all three parts of government.

(All three of which are as complicit in this as we are.)

If I were a real journalist like David Gregory, this all might make me depressed.

¶
Watching Real Time with Bill Maher is a truly painful experience. In just a few tortuous minutes of the program, its hallmarks become clear: an endless barrage of jokes made unabashedly at the expense of the oppressed, justified as critiques of “political correctedness,” is punctuated by mind-numbing expressions of ignorance, thinly veiled behind an air of bombastic righteousness and shameless self-aggrandizement, all situated squarely within a setting of diehard Democrat cheerleading.

Painted as “very liberal,” even as a “leftist” by the mainstream (read: corporate) media and popular culture, the eponymous host has, unfortunately for all of us, come to embody the mainstream (read: corporate) “Left” in this country. This “Left,” however, is not much different than the Right; both share a passion for unmitigated bigotry. Bill Maher is the Democrat’s Glenn Beck. Both pundits fancy themselves comedians (the prevalence with which both laugh at their own jokes evinces that), satirists, armed with jokes as their weapon, laughter as their proselytizer, taking on perceived cultural ills for the betterment of humanity.

The problem is that both do exactly the contrary.

Let us not assume, nonetheless, that equivalence in direction implies equivalence in degree. I firmly hold that Bill Maher brings us further away from achieving true human progress, equality, and liberation than Glenn Beck. I genuinely mean that. (Now, do not confuse this for a Beck apology. Too many people are needlessly suffering and dying (being murdered) to waste breath on discussing, even considering discussing, that Neo-Nazi wolf in neocon sheep’s clothing.) For, unlike Beck’s, Maher’s bigotry is cozily nested within a liberal framework, a framework whose adherents have genuinely fought against particular forms (but, significantly, not all forms) of oppression and injustice. The bigotry thus is not seen as such by the preponderance of liberals watching it; it becomes the accepted way things are. “Democrats can’t be bigots! Republicans are the ones who are bigots!” the binary logic goes. The liberal’s, Maher’s concomitant bigotry becomes normalized not as concomitant bigotry but as concomitant fact. Maher’s bigotry and Maher’s message come to be inextricable; one cannot exist without the other. McLuhan rolls in his grave; we have ignored his premonition: when bigotry is the medium, bigotry is the message.

Given the Brobdingnagian breadth of Bill’s bigotry, and the length required to address all of it, this work will be published in two separate segments. Although all of this criticism is framed through an intersectional approach—because, in order to adequately address one form of oppression, one must address them all—the former half will address the most serious forms, that is to say, the ones that deal directly or indirectly with the policies that lead to the murder of innocent human beings (and lots of them). These include Maher’s virulent anti-Islam prejudice, undying support for U.S. imperialism, and dogmatic defense of the Democrats. The latter half will address the more cultural prejudices Maher exudes, namely racism, misogyny, classism, and heterosexism. It will also discuss the wider political and cultural implications of Maher’s bigotry. This ordering is certainly not to say that these latter subjects are less significant than the former; Racism, misogyny, classism, heterosexism ruin, even destroy lives too. In regards to the former political criticisms, however, the degree of graveness, in terms of the overwhelming numbers of human lives lost, affords it more salience.

A great place to begin any analysis of Maher’s numerous prejudices is the poetically-titled blog Bill Maher Sucks. Its collection of criticisms, spanning the last three years (with the bulk of the content from 2012), is unfortunately rather small, and by no means comprehensive, yet it allows one, at the least, to get a feel for the variety and the nature of bigotry we are dealing with here. Bill Maher Sucks’ author writes “Bill Maher is a vile racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, ableist, Zionist, classist idiot.” A more accurate and succinct description could hardly be made. I would add a few more qualifiers: Bill Maher is a narcissistic, vile imperialist, racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, ableist, Zionist, classist idiot millionaire Democrat-apologist, blind to any and all of his privileges. Let us look at examples, from Maher’s own show, from Maher’s own mouth.

A good amount of work has already been written about the figure’s unapologetic anti-Islam prejudice (and its closely-linked racism). This is an easy first target. It is the most overt; he practically boasts it. Yes, Maher is critical of all religions, and I myself strongly believe in the importance of having a space to publicly critique religion—albeit in a socially responsible, respectable, and equitable manner, none of which describes his approach. Maher, nonetheless, reserves particular hatred for Islam. In a peculiar break from his dogmatic liberal extolment, Maher claims the notion that all religions are equally good (or bad) is “liberal bull shit” (strange, after Maher criticized Kerry for eschewing the “L-word.”).

Maher takes great joy in consistently making inflammatory, downright ludicrous claims like “at least half of Muslims believe it is all right to kill someone who insults ‘the Prophet,” or “There’s only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith.” Completely fabricating statistics to support his position is a popular Maherian tactic. The pundit needs no citations, of course, for his positions are not based on those silly scientific “studies”; His opinions are facts merely by virtue of them being His opinions. Moments of unrepentant prejudice like these are enthusiastically lauded by far-right “news” sources and blogs, by bigots rejoicing at bipartisan anti-Islam prejudice. Claiming that Islamic extremism is more dangerous than far-right extremism nevertheless is both intellectually and statistically reprehensible. This self-professed liberal, this individual many describe as a “leftist” (a shudder goes down my spine even thinking about that), had the perfect opportunity to publicly discuss the very real threat ofrising far-right terrorism and extremism in this country vis-à-vis the relatively paltry threat of so-called “Islamic” terrorism (that is to say, “terrorism” that is never actually about Islam, and always about imperialism). Maher, though, in his trademark aversion to fact, chooses to rant and rave about what his prejudices tell him we should be afraid of.

For a man who claims his irreligious sentiments are firmly rooted in science, Maher irrationally fixates on small exceptions. Even when reminded that one in every four people in the world is Muslim, Maher adamantly maintains his ardent antipathy for all things Islamic. In 2010, he infamously expressed his fear that “the Western world [will] be taken over by Islam,” because the most common name for newborn British baby boys was Mohammed (even while Muslims made up less than five percent of the British population). “Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that?” he asked, “Because I am” he added—the antecedent for “I am” meaning “I am a racist,” of course. “[I]t’s not because of the race, it’s because of the religion,” he assures us… But then why is he so afraid of the name Mohammed? Like the racist, neo-con “New Atheists,” Maher uses his anti-Islam prejudice as a convenient cover for his anti-Arab racism.

Simple facts like, you know, the fact that Indonesia has the world’s largest population, and that over 60% of the world’s Muslim population is in Asia, not the Middle East, are unimportant to, and frankly beyond Maher. “I should be alarmed, and I don’t apologize for it,” Maher reminds us, before agreeing wholeheartedly with his far-right guests on the threat of Sharia Law destroying our Western “justice” system. The completely fabricated, anti-Islamic, racist myth of Sharia law is a hot topic on Maher’s show, and the anti-Islamic, racist pundit never questions it.

To Maher, Muslims and Arabs are the same thing. This is how he justifies his overtly racist insistence that, for “women who have dated an Arab man, the results aren’t good,” and that “Arab men have a sense of ‘entitlement’”; or, in his trademark statistics-fabrication, that “in 19 of 22” Muslim-majority countries, women “can’t vote.” In the end, Maher’s not afraid of hiding his white supremacy: “They’re worse. What’s wrong with just saying that?”

One could spend hours recounting the anti-Islam and anti-Arab prejudice; given its adequate coverage, nevertheless, there is no need for me to rehash it here. I will spend more time focusing on the numerous other ways in which Maher is a jingoist reactionary.

Closely tied to Maher’s anti-Islam prejudice, and the most dangerous thing about the cultural figure, is Maher’s steadfast defense of U.S. imperialism. Once again, in close accord with the “New Atheists,” Maher, a so-called “left”-leaning (in terms of U.S. politics, which really means “a little right-leaning”) person, has no problem defending flag-waving militarism and collective punishment (of Muslims) for crimes that individuals (usually sponsored, you got it, by Uncle Sam) committed. Huntington’s patently absurd (and unequivocally racist) “Clash of Civilizations” thesis is taken to an even more extreme degree in the hands of Maher. “My favorite new government program is surprising violent religious zealots in the middle of the night and shooting them in the face” Maher exclaims enthusiastically.

Yes, you read (heard) that correctly. Maher just applauded extrajudicial, internationally illegal slaughter of “religious zealots.” And by “religious zealots” Maher means Muslims. He doesn’t mean Christians; he doesn’t mean Hindus; he doesn’t mean Buddhists. The last time I checked, the U.S. government doesn’t organize covert operations to shoot Christian, Hindus, or Buddhists in the middle of the night. The last time I checked, the U.S. doesn’t bomb Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist funerals and weddings. Maher knows he doesn’t need to decode his words; the meaning is clear: his favorite U.S. government program is Uncle Sam murdering Muslims.

Playing off of the filthy words of the filthy Thomas Friedman, this is Big Stick Policy 3.0. And Maher can’t speak highly enough of it.

This blatant disregard for civilian casualties (of Muslims) is of course prevalent among Democrats, but few Democrats are portrayed in popular culture as “liberal” as is Maher, and even fewer have a widely-watched television show on which they spew their liberal balderdash.

Liberal balderdash is in no small amount on Real Time with Bill Maher.In typical partisanship-induced blindness, Maher, virtually without exception, retreats into defense mode when Democrats are attacked, but becomes iridescently gung ho when it’s time for Republican-bashing. Glenn Greenwald’s first (and, much to the chagrin of the truth-seeker, probably last) appearance on Maher’s show on 10 May is a case in point.

In typical partisan prevarication, Maher skirts around any genuine criticism of “his side” by, instead of addressing the legitimacy or veracity of the actual point of criticism, quickly mentioning the even greater and more numerous criticisms of the “other side.” In the context of Benghazi, in place of actually addressing the incident, Maher swiftly fixates on the GOP’s scandals. When the ever-perspicacious Greenwald makes the elementary moral observation that, regardless of which faction of the Business Party is responsible for the scandal, some serious issues need to be addressed, Maher scarcely nods before changing the subject. (Literally: He says “I’m bored” right when things get hot and moves on to a new topic.)

When Maher transitions into the episode’s obligatory Muslim-bashing, Greenwald, as always, rationally combats the ignorant bigotry, justifying his position with historical evidence (e.g., U.S. support for military occupation and apartheid in Palestine) and carefully conducted research (e.g., U.S. support for Mubarak). Maher? He just goes with his gut. You don’t need that silly “evidence,” yet alone “history” stuff. This is common sense! How can you mistrust Emperor Obama?! islam iz evilz!

For Maher, when a Republican commits an atrocity, you’re (rightfully) obligated to call it out for the crime against humanity that it is. When a Democrat does it, on the other hand, he tells us, we should be a little more pragmatic, a little more realistic here. We’re under attack.Civilization itself is under attack. Bush? His war was the corrupt, inchoate conquest, for political dominion and natural resources (which it was). Obama? His war is the moral defense of the “free” world, the stark reality that we, the “civilized,” are fighting to protect our very existence. Anything is defensible when we are fighting such a war. Anything.

The blog Political Pwnage could have articulated it no more perfectly when it titled this segment “Bill Maher’s Blind Eye to US Imperialism is Poked Out by Glenn Greenwald.” Maher’s blind eye, Maher’s appalling ignorance of the history of Western imperialism in the Middle East, ofpropping up violent, draconian dictators for economic and political ends, of the indefensible, genocidal, war crimes and atrocities committed on innocent civilians; Maher’s silence on his guests’ jingoist, conceited white washing of the fundamentally conservative, anti-democratic American Revolution as history’s “greatest” revolution, silence when his guest posits that mentioning this country’s history having been founded upon slavery is a “cheap blow”; the fundamentally racist, imperialist PROPAGANDA in just this segment, yet alone the entire show; all of it is absolutely vomit-inducing.

“Foreign policy” (a euphemism for imperialism) is not the only issue Bill Maher doggedly defends, however. The pundit, with very few exceptions (his opposition to the “War on Drugs” perhaps being the only example), marches resolutely in step with whatever Obama and the Democrats are doing, whenever they are doing it. Even more recently, Maher, along with fellow diehard Democrat apologist guest Michael Moore, waxed poetic on “Obamacare,” proclaiming, tears of love and admiration practically trailing down his cheeks, “This is the heart of Obama. This is the heart of capitalism. I’m wondering why the people who love the free market so much are not for this.”

This isn’t sarcasm. Maher is melodiously marveling at the boons of the Drone Despot. And, yes, he really did just say “the heart of capitalism”without any intended irony.

That, “Obamacare” is not universal health care, by any stretch of the imagination; that it leaves at least 30 million Americans uninsured; that, instead of combatting the hellish privatized nightmare of a health“care” system (“system” meaning industry, in our case) that is destroying our country and economy (and bringing us, our health, and even our lives down with it), The Affordable Care Act ensures the continued existence and exploits of the very moral-less, starry-eyed (“starry” meaning “dollar-sign”) corporations responsible by forcingAmericans to purchase health“care” from them—none of that is mentioned. It’s all off the table, because it’s all taboo. You can’t criticize Emperor Obama. Explaining that Obamacare is just another bailout, just another subsidy for corporate chaos, while a guest on Maher’s show (if you even have a chance to finish the sentence before Maher cuts you off) is “helping the GOP”; it is a Maherian death wish.

For someone that opposes organized religion, Maher is awfully dogmatic. But this shouldn’t surprise us. After all, Maher is a loud, obnoxious, expensive advertisement for the Democrat faction of the Business Party.

In the second half of this column, I will concentrate on the ways in which Maher’s numerous cultural prejudices complement his doctrinaire politics, historical ignorance, and militarist, imperialist cheerleading; and discuss how Maher’s failings in not even addressing, let alone dissecting them harms us all.

When Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, the pantheon of today’s right-wing proto-fascists step onto their televised pulpits, we know that they are “vile racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, ableist, Zionist, classist” war-mongering capitalist xenophobes. The far-right slant of Fox “News” is widely acknowledged; these figures are bastions of neo-conservatism, proudly affiliating with, preaching the gospel of overtly imperialist, militarist politics. Democrats, progressives, and the left-leaning have learned to give little credence to, even to tune out, this ridiculous noise. When they turn to figures like Bill Maher (not to mention John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, et al.) in response, therefore, the presumption is that this imperialism and militarism, along with these numerous forms of oppression and bigotry, are absent. The truth is they are anything but.

Maher is not a leftist. He, like the rest of the Democrat faction of the Business Party, is just slightly less right of center than the Republican faction. The sooner we all wake up and realize that, the better.

Ben Norton is an artist and activist. His website can be found at http://bennorton.com/.