No wonder the Right wants to revive the Cold War. It was so easy to understand -- for them. It's just a shame real life really isn't like the WWF

Young Johnny is sending the "McCainettes," Holy Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to Georgia. Watch for our Lindsey's shopping report.

"American newspapers have run story after story about how 'evil' Russia invaded a sovereign neighboring state. Many accounts made it seem as though the conflict was started by an aggressive Russia invading the Georgian territory of South Ossetia. Some said that South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, was destroyed by the Russian army. Little attention was paid to the chronology of events, the facts underlying the conflict. . . .

"Over the past week, American media have achieved one thing for sure: They have lost prestige among a generation of young Russians who believed that America is a country of true, uncorrupted, independent information."

-- master's degree candidate and Washington Post intern Olga Ivanova,
in an op-ed piece in yesterday's Post, "A Free Press? Not This Time."

by Ken

Note: Howie is enmeshed in a computer crisis that's likely to be unresolvable before Monday, so we may or may not be hearing from him over the weekend. Meanwhile we soldier on. The following is a story we had a chance to chat about a bit, so you'll find some input from him.

It was inevitable that some benighted right-winger complain about my post regarding professional superliar Jerome Corsi's latest steaming heap of doody, the Obama hatchet job that pea-brained propagandist Mary Matalin published under her imprint at Simon & Schuster, with the apparent approval of the corporate swine who now run that once-proud publishing house and apparently think our Mary can steer some of those boodles of moron money they think right-wing publishers are piling up from readers who'll pay cash to have their ignorance and prejudices reinforced. The complaint: that I referred to Corsi's barrage of "facts."

Of course they aren't facts, they're "facts." Corsi doesn't have any facts. What he has, what he's made his vile career of, is lies, delusions, fabrications, and utter bullshit, fueled by bigotry, ignorance, and greed -- he knows, after all, that there's gold to be mined from befuddled right-wingers who like to see someone take down their betters. The problem, as my colleague Jeffrey Feldman was pointing out, is that when you drop these delusions and lies by the bookful on an unsuspecting public, and when in media sound bites you drop a bushel of 'em in a TV segment where there's no opportunity to debunk each of the delusions and lies individually, you have eliminated any possibility of reasonable discussion.

Is it possible that right-wingers don't know they're being lied to? Every second of every day, by every lying scumbag of a right-wing pol as well as the media who service the cause, the famous Right-Wing Noise Machine? Yes, I think it's entirely possible, because at least since the days of the sainted Ronald Reagan, these people have been told that they no longer have to be slaves to reality.

"Screw reality!" was essentially the Reagan message. "You don't have to believe anything you don't want to."

The result is that for a large segment of the American public, there is no such thing as reality. There's only what I call reality-substitute -- a web of story lines that use the names of real people and places but carefully craft them in such a way as to suit that segment of the public's deluded preconceptions. The new test for "reality" isn't whether it's true but whether it makes people feel good.

Is there any better model for this process than professional wrestling? Enthralled viewers seem to eat up the carefully assembled package, with its cartoon violence and its painstakingly scripted cast of characters, with its good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. I'm sure any wrestling fan will confirm the importance of those villains -- they're really what makes the show go. (Soap-opera fans know this too. A really great villain is a treasure to soap producers, so valuable that they will go to almost any lengths to make sure that their villain never pays the price for his/her villainies.)

Now I think that most viewers of professional wrestling know that the whole thing is rigged. They do, don't they? There aren't any, or at least many, viewers who think they're watching actual "matches," are there? But I think those viewers manage to suppress that distracting reality, the better to enjoy the vastly more entertaining reality unfolding on their screens.

It seems to me that this is exactly the way Americans have been encouraged -- by different parties, for different reasons -- to view the crisis between Russia and Georgia.

Apparently it never seems to occur to Americans, even in the face of the ongoing disastrous messes playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it's dangerous for us to blunder into international imbroglios of enormous geopolitical and historical complexity where we truly have no understanding of any of those complexities. No, we seem to be perfectly happy to apply the professional-wrestling model: Pick out the good guys and bad guys, and settle back with lots of snacks to enjoy the show.

Some of this enjoyment, naturally, will involve carefully engineered rage and hysteria. Just as when the villainous wrestler is seen to be defeating the heroic one by cheating his behind off, and the [expletive] ref lets it go on, when the villain country in defiance of all that's right and holy beats up on the heroic put-upon good country, there is apt to be much spectator participation, in the form of fist-pumping and yelling and otherwise raging. As the wrestling promoters, this makes viewers feel good -- gets the juices flowing, probably releases some luscious hormones.

At this point I want you introduce the interesting op-ed piece I quoted from above. I don't want to except it further -- it really should be read whole. Hey, it's Saturday. You have some time, right?

A Free Press? Not This Time.

By Olga Ivanova
Friday, August 15, 2008; A21

I wish I could fly back to Russia. I have been in the United States for a year, and I am studying and working here to get experience in American journalism, known worldwide for its independence and professionalism. But in recent days it has felt as though I am too late, that the journalism of Watergate is well behind us and that reporting is no longer fair and balanced.

For years I have respected American newspapers for being independent. But no longer. Coverage of the conflict between Russia and Georgia has been unprofessional, to say the least. I was surprised and disappointed that the world's media immediately took the side of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili last week.

American newspapers have run story after story about how "evil" Russia invaded a sovereign neighboring state. Many accounts made it seem as though the conflict was started by an aggressive Russia invading the Georgian territory of South Ossetia. Some said that South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, was destroyed by the Russian army. Little attention was paid to the chronology of events, the facts underlying the conflict.

Last week, Georgia's president invaded South Ossetia during the night, much as Adolf Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Within hours, Georgian troops destroyed Tskhinvali, a city of 100,000, and they killed more than 2,000 civilians. Almost all of the people who died that night were Russian citizens. They chose to become citizens of Russia years ago, when Georgia refused to recognize South Ossetia as a non-Georgian territory.

The truth is that, in this case, Russian aggression actually made some sense. Russia defended its citizens.

Yet American newspapers published stories that omitted mention of the Georgian invasion. And American media as a whole have been disturbingly pro-Georgian. The lead photograph on the front page of Sunday's Post showed two men -- one dead, the other crying -- amid ruins in Gori, Georgia. Many other images could have been used. Monday's Wall Street Journal, for example, contained several stories about the conflict and even an op-ed by Saakashvili. Where was the Russian response?

I understand why the Georgian government would block access to Russian media Web sites. I understand why Russian media would present events in a light that favors Moscow's actions. But American media are not supposed to do the equivalent.

The much-revered American principle of a free press guarantees access to an independent source of information. It is supposed to mean that nobody takes a side, that journalists give readers the facts and let them draw their own conclusions. The Georgian president quickly became a chief newsmaker for Western media outlets, yet little could be found to explain the Russian side.

It's hard to understand how and why the terrible situation between Georgia and Russia has played out this way. Everything seemed too clear for the journalists writing about the conflict: Big, evil Russia tried to destroy small, democratic Georgia.

And the American media's willingness to choose sides provoked Russian media outlets. Russian newspapers did not waste time reminding readers that the true evil was the United States and that Washington was ultimately responsible for the conflict in Ossetia and Georgia.

Beyond the slanted coverage, I am also concerned about the lack of information on the number of civilians killed and wounded. How should we know which accounts to trust?

Over the past week, American media have achieved one thing for sure: They have lost prestige among a generation of young Russians who believed that America is a country of true, uncorrupted, independent information. Many Russian youths come to the United States for college and then go back to Russia to help build our own democracy. Russians believe in democracy. But I don't know whether many Russians will ever trust American media reports again.

U.S. newspapers have lost esteem among Russian journalists as well. These reporters have long looked to American newspapers as icons of quality journalism. They are supposed to stand for truth and serve the people's interests. But whose interests did newspapers serve by publishing stories in the best traditions of the Cold War?

I think that both the Russian and Georgian governments attacked civilians. I blame the governments for this war. But I am also saddened by the unfair coverage of the conflict from Russian and American media. If this is what freedom of the press looks like, then I no longer want to believe in this freedom. I prefer to stay neutral and independent, just like a professional journalist has to do.

The writer, a master's degree candidate at Duquesne University, is an intern at The Post.

What Ms. Ivanova is possibly too polite to point out is that it's not just the media who've jumped into the ring. There's the president of the United States for one, and for another that crazy old coot, Young Johnny McCranky, whose presidential campaign is essentially on the payroll of the president of Georgia, and almost totally devoid of actual facts about the situation. Still, who cares about facts when there are readily available delusions, distortions, and obfuscations suitable for getting adrenalin pumping among spectators who don't care about niceties like reality.

Howie pointed out an interesting wrinkle. We know, of course, that top McCranky foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann was a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government until his sudden withdrawal from the lobbying world in March. We know too that the Georgians have continued to employ his old lobbying shop. Plus we know that the U.S. government continues to pump massive quantities of aid into Georgia, to support the imagined flourishing democracy there. So is it not fair, he wonders, to say that the U.S. is effectively paying Scheumemann and his old partners in crime? (Notice that it's no longer easy to distinguish who's the master and who's the client here.)

As I pointed out, though, isn't this just proof that the system works? Here we have Uncle Sam dumping money into a foreign country for dubious reasons, but when that money winds up coming back into the pockets of good solid American Bush cronies, isn't it all good?

If you then take into consideration the point Ms. Ivanova makes about American media coverage, you could also say that the Georgian investment in American lobbying prowess has paid off hugely, in a propaganda blitz blanketing our august infotainment media.

Understand, please, that I'm not taking a position here on the crisis in the Caucasus -- unless you consider it a "position" to point out that anyone who even hints that we're prepared to go to war against Russia needs to be institutionalized. I'm just saying that the people who are piling onto the Georgian side, like the shamelessly ignorant demagogue who announced the other day that today we're all Georgians, are not only wrong but dangerously wrong. Their screeching ignorance can only produce an increasingly disastrous result. The situation calls for sanity and informed mediation. Strategy and tactics borrowed from the WWF have no place.

Most incredibly, we're hearing from all around that the vile McCranky, whose ignorance of the situation is total and who apparently has no solutions to world problems except "Let's bomb 'em," has been "looking presidential." In fact, insofar as he has been engaged in behavior legally permitted only to the president, it seems to me he ought to be facing indictment for busting a host of laws, and on his way to prison. If the crazy old coot doesn't find his way to a nice secure loony bin first.

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