VISION 100--CENTURY OF AVIATION REAUTHORIZATION ACT--CONFERENCE REPORT--Resumed -- (Senate - November 17, 2003)
Mr. THOMAS. I ask unanimous consent that the Talon News article by Jeff Gannon dated September 23, 2003 be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Talon News Sept. 23, 2003]
Daschle, Lautenberg Vow to Fight FAA Privatization They Supported in 1994
(By Jeff Gannon)
Congressional Record
Forget for a moment if you will - or if the author of the above-referenced article will go mercifully silent as promised and let you - the personal life of this particular "reporter." Forget too the content of admittedly jaw-droppingly boring subject matter above and grasp this bald fact:
We now have written indelibly into the United States of America's Congressional Record an article that is the product of a window-dressed false front of a sham "news" agency run by the GOP - and the most rabid and vicious arm of the national party at that, the Texas branch, long known as the spawning ground for dirty tricks, no-holds-barred double and triple crossings, and outright lies.
This article is now part of our history as a nation. When future scholars examine the official, published account of the speeches and debates and votes of the United States Congress, they will find this article by Gannon embedded in our national record. Whether future readers will be bamboozled and mistake this report as legitimate, or use its inclusion as an example of a high-water mark of shame upon our professed ideals as a democracy, we cannot know. What we can acknowledge as citizens is this:
We as a people now own this moment of our history.
There being no objection ....
Nope, not one objection back in November 2003. To be fair, senators are not gifted with preternatural foresight and never could have predicted the quick and boisterous unraveling of the GOPUSA/Talon News façade and its sham reporter.
There being no objection ....
Not from the mainstream media these days, at any rate.
Desperate to preserve sinecures on the CNN/MSNBC talking head circuit, we currently are witnessing the abominably asinine spectacle of the very people who gloried in - and made a shitload of money off of - Clinton's sex life, setting themselves up as impromptu ethical experts. Much scolding of the rabble on the blogs has ensued for daring to amplify Mr. Guckert's public internet postings of photographs to hawk his bodily wares.
Meanwhile, our democracy circles the drain.
A media that squanders priceless minutes with an audience of millions on the cheap and tawdry bangles of the deeper story renders itself not only irrelevant but actively dangerous to democratic principles. By choosing to "report" and "analyze" the blog coverage of Gannon's private life instead of the darker implications of this administration's propaganda campaigns, the consistent attrition of our civil rights, the lies that led to the invasion in Iraq and the increasing violations of the principles of our republic, the ensconced traditional reporters are not merely enablers of these very processes, they have become accomplices in hiding the truth from the American people.
It's time to face it, folks: the mainstream media isn't going to save this country. Put that battered copy of All the President's Men back up on the shelf. Like the Geneva Convention's strictures against torture, Woodward's and Bernstein's saga is an artifact, lovely in its own way, but charmingly and naively "quaint."
This administration is engaged in an organized, minutely orchestrated assault on our everyday sense of reality. From Photoshopped campaign ads, to bought pundits, to staged rallies demanding loyalty oaths, we are being treated to an Oberammergau of epically Texan proportions, make no mistake, much of it brought to you by the providers of such quality material as Talon News and GOPUSA.
The Germans this week instinctively recoiled when Mr. Bush sought to repeat the performance that had played so well in America during the recent presidential campaign: the staged town hall meeting, complete with scripted questions submitted in advance. With all our superiority and jokes about the "good Germans" and our mock horror at their complicity as a dictator slinked into power, mea culpas from Americans are due. The German people, who have been on a nightmare stroll around the propaganda block recently enough in modern history for them to smell the rotting stench of a small, cowardly, nascent tyrant a wide ocean away, called our president on his shit. No wink and a nod and a "hey, it's just politics as usual" from the Rhineland. No sirree.
The Germans recognize a politics most unusual when they see it.
Balanced as the American nation is on the edge of a true one-party state, with even futile and ineffective parliamentary maneuvers by the meek minority party being threatened with "nuclear options" by the swaggering majority machine, it is time to wake up. It is time to stir out of the big sleep. The press isn't going to save us. The Democrats, with procedural gelding threatened in the Senate, are not going to save us. There is, sadly, no mommy and daddy of democracy to save us and our nation and our ideals. As silly and pompous as it sounds, it may in the end come down to the blogs and to the rabble and to the swarm and to the whole messy lot of infuriating, argumentative, name-calling, fierce, inglorious lot of true patriotic curmudgeons on both the left and the right to simply NOT shut the hell up.
We need to continue to turn over the rocks and peer at the slimy writhing (corporate regroupings, domain registration changes, crashed web sites) of GOPUSA and all its cloned forms throughout cyberspace, on the airwaves and in the press. We need to ensure that propagandized crap such as the Talon News "article" never make it into our official national records again. To that end, Gannon is only the first stepping stone on a long and possibly fruitless journey; it is a trip I believe we nonetheless need to make and an endeavor worthy of dedicating our time, talents and treasure.
This community and the others like it at Eschaton and Media Matters and AmericaBlog and the countless smaller blogs laboring away in relative obscurity need to keep one thought in mind every step of the way, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient it gets. We have a responsibility to truth, to our nation, to our democratic ideals and to our world.
We as a people now own this moment of our history.