From Consortium News
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016.
(Image by (Photo by Gage Skidmore)) Details DMCA
America's extended Christmas holiday season, stretching through much of November and all of December, has not been a happy time for Official Washington's dominant neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks.
First, they had to lick their wounds over the defeat of their preferred U.S. presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton; then they had to watch as their "moderate" Syrian rebel proxies and their Al Qaeda allies were routed from east Aleppo; and finally they watched in disbelief as the Obama administration permitted passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel's illegal settlements on Palestinian lands.
To say that the neocons and liberal hawks have not taken these reversals well would be an understatement. They have pretty much blamed Clinton's defeat on everyone but themselves and Clinton herself. They have been apoplectic over Aleppo and their lost dream of "regime change" in Syria. And they have sputtered in outrage over President Obama's failure to veto the Israeli anti-settlement resolution.
Regarding Clinton's defeat, her embrace of the neocon/liberal-hawk "regime change" obsessions siphoned off enthusiasm among the peace faction of the Democratic Party, a significant and activist part of the progressive movement.
Clinton's alignment with the neocon/liberal hawks may have helped her with the mainstream media, but the MSM has lost much of its credibility by making itself a handmaiden in leading the nation to wars and more wars.
Average Americans also could feel the contempt that these elites had for the rest of us. The neocons and liberal hawks had come to believe in the CIA's concept of "perception management," feeling that the American people were items to be controlled, not the nation's sovereigns to be informed and respected. Instead of "We the People," Official Washington's elites treated us like "Us the Sheep."
Though this "perception management" idea took hold during the Reagan administration -- largely in reaction to the public's distrust of U.S. foreign policy following the Vietnam War -- it became a bipartisan practice, extending through George W. Bush's WMD sham about Iraq and into the behavior of the Obama administration in manipulating public opinion about Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Russia, pretty much any country targeted for "regime change."
So, when this establishment tried to force Hillary Clinton's coronation down the nation's throat, enough Americans choked at the idea -- even to the extent of voting for the eminently unqualified Donald Trump -- to deny Clinton the White House. Indeed, many Americans who reluctantly did vote for Clinton did so only because they considered Trump even more unfit to lead the nation. The two candidates were in a fierce competition for who would arouse the most public revulsion.
No Self-Reflection
But the neocons and liberal hawks are not ones for self-reflection and self-criticism. They move from one disaster to the next, finding others to blame and justifying their own failures by publishing self-apologias in the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Thus, for the past several weeks, we have witnessed daily meltdowns across the mainstream media as neocons and liberal interventionists fume about all the forces that conspired to deny them their God-given right to select who runs America.
The mainstream media ranted about a few incidents of "fake news" -- concocted stories designed to get lots of clicks from Trump supporters -- despite its own long history of publishing false and misleading stories. The MSM then tried to tar with that "fake news" broad brush serious independent Web sites that simply displayed professional skepticism toward propaganda emanating from the U.S. State Department.
The smear blurred the "fake news scandal" with what was deemed "Russian propaganda." Anyone who wouldn't march in lockstep with the State Department's messaging must be a "Kremlin stooge." Mainstream media outlets even began demanding that major technology companies, such as Facebook and Google, join in establishing a modern-age Ministry of Truth for the Internet that would punish independent Websites that didn't toe the Official Line.
Then, there was the hysteria over the CIA's still-unproven claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a scheme to hack into Democratic emails and expose embarrassing facts, such as the Democratic National Committee's tilting the primary playing field to favor Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders, the contents of Clinton's paid speeches to her Wall Street benefactors, and pay-to-play features of the Clinton money machine.
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