Propaganda or Reporting?

Among the other bogus controversies swirling about the Bushies over the past month—as treasonous intelligence officials past and present have united with the socialists running the MSM to further compromise our Nation's safety and security—we've been regaled with tall tales (and maybe true) of the armed forces' efforts to plant a bit of pro-US spin in the Iraqi press. We're shocked! Shocked!

Wretchard of Belmont Club fame takes on this issue in a recent piece. He argues, effectively, that in past times, we could usually depend on our "objective" press to back the US and its military when we were at war, thus providing crucial social and cultural backup to our armed forces. We'd observe that since 'Nam, however, the media in this country and in the West in general, have indulged in precisely the opposite behavior, "reporting" with universal disapproval of our actions, in a way that actively undermines this country's safety and the wellbeing of the military engaged in the fight. With Al Jazeera happily cheerleading the Islamofascists on to greater atrocities, the West unfortunately lacks a counterpart to help out our guys. Our media today happily marches to the tune of the jihad's propagandists, no doubt as part of a near-Gramscian effort to entirely undermine the credibility of the US. And, of course, fulfill the media's current prime directive: destroy George W. Bush, a task of far greater importance to them than helping protect us against the predations of medieval savages.

So what's a military to do when their own guys effectively support the enemy 24/7? If they can't get support from the media anymore—support they once could count on in the days before the MSM considered itself the intellectual elite—they have decided that they'll generate that support for themselves. Good choice.

Wretchard concludes:

If there is any evil greater than war itself it must surely be to make war without meaning it; to recruit allies without intending to stand by them; to send men into battle without purposing victory; to embark on campaign of arms that we ourselves do not believe in; and to kill in preference to persuasion. But maybe there's a greater. One writer at Slate argued that a worse danger is the conceit that any message is worth persuading others to believe. "The notion of evil has become profoundly maladaptive. Today, saying our enemy is 'evil' is like saying a preventable tragedy is 'God's will': It's a way of letting ourselves off the hook for crimes committed in our name. Not incidentally, it's also a way for our enemies to let themselves off the hook." They don't need to be let off the hook; they were never on it.

The italics are ours, and highlight the voice of Wretchard commenting on the Slate writer's inanity and hollow reasoning. The phenomenon Wretchard describes is essentially a self-preening sedition cloaked in the phoney intellectual fog of negative utopianism. It is at its base the same, harping moral equivalency meme that has dry rotted our democracy from within, just as Antonio Gramsci, the stealth Marxist revolutionary, predicted it would.