The incessant recital of utterly meaningless polling statistics brought back a really old memory — the infamous military press briefings, known as the five o’clock follies, from the Viet Nam war. You have to have been there, but let me try to summarize for people born long after the event.
The briefings occurred in a bar on the roof of Saigon's Rex Hotel, and journalists alternately cracked cynical jokes and shouted at officials, often complaining about a Credibility gap between official reports and the truth.
Viet Nam was a guerilla war, without front lines. The Pentagon, under uber bean-counter “Whiz Kid” Robert McNamara, came up with a statistic, the body count, to measure military progress. It was a statistic that took on an appalling life of its own:
the body count was the measuring stick for the success of any operation. Competitions were held between units for the highest number of Vietnamese killed in action, or KIAs. Army and marine officers knew that promotions were largely based on confirmed kills. The pressure to produce confirmed kills resulted in massive fraud. One study revealed that 61 % of American commanders considered that body counts were grossly exaggerated.
That’s the background for this diary.
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Today, a guerilla war of sorts has broken out among both right-wing and left-wing populists against the corrupt political establishment of the U.S. Now, I’m not going to try to make an analogy between the four way fight in America today, and the nine-way clusterfuck that was the war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s (don’t forget our covert wars in Laos and Cambodia; or the entire Golden Triangle drug trade that funded CIA ops). But, as far as the media description of today’s politics goes, the NYT/WaPo elite media is behaving exactly like the five o’clock follies briefers.
All they want to talk about is the body count; and only the good numbers. Dubious polls are reported heavily if they favor the establishment. Contradictory results, like soldiers killed in ambushes or massive drug abuse, are rarely commented upon. The polls represent yet another attempt to quantify "winning hearts and minds". This time, of the American electorate. And most of these polls are simultaneously statistically flawed (likely voters, cell phone voters, voters who screen calls with caller ID, etc.) and clearly partisan (biased group weightings, push-polls, etc.). They are as predictable and as wrong as all the “light at the end of the tunnel” speeches of Viet Nam.
What today’s “folliers” are trying to hide is that the bipartisan U.S. political establishment is about as popular as the transplanted North Vietnamese-born Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was in Buddhist South VietNam. (Few remember that the French favored Catholic Vietnamese, or that Diem was a Catholic. I do because, as a Catholic kid, I had to endure the entire Tom Dooley propaganda campaign.)
Many historians have claimed that Diệm's religious policies favored Catholics and that he persecuted many Buddhists. According to Buttinger, the distribution of weapons to village self-defense militias intended to repel Việt Cộng guerrillas saw weapons only given to Catholics. Some Buddhist villages converted en masse in order to receive aid or avoid being forcibly resettled by Diệm's regime. Karnow points out that the Catholic Church was the largest landowner in the country, and the "private" status that was imposed on Buddhism by the French, which required official permission to conduct public Buddhist activities, was never repealed by Diệm. Jacobs also shows that Catholics were also de facto exempt from the corvée labor that the government obliged all citizens to perform; U.S. aid was disproportionately distributed to Catholic majority villages.
It was as if Cuban refugees had occupied Florida with armed support from the Pentagon/CIA. (Some people would say that isn’t an analogy; its the truth.) In terms of this diary, the Democratic Party leadership has been put in place by the Washington establishment, and lately, has been reinforced by “moderate” refugees from the Texas Taliban.
As for today’s splintered populist opposition, you could say that the Sanders folks are the Buddhist monks who, by burning themselves to death, exposed the corrupt mess that was the Government of South Viet Nam (GSVN). But, to paraphrase Stalin, “how many divisions did the Buddhists have?”
It was the organized ranks of the Viet Cong that completed the eventually successful defeat of the follow-on imposed puppet government of Thieu and Ky. Now it would be an insult to the Viet Cong to compare them to the GOP rank and file. However, the GOP is increasingly looking like an American version of ISIS — disgruntled Sunni Iraqi officers running a guerilla+conventional war funded by rich fundamentalist religious nuts, in order to get back into power.
That’s as far as I’m taking this analogy.
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After Monday's NYT's sandbag job, anyone with a brain should recognize that the corporate elite media is nothing but the “five o’clock” follies brought back for a rerun. They want to whitewash the billions of dollars in corrupt campaign spending and the anti-democratic cliques that hold the political systems’ leadership positions.
The only positive spin I can find is that, until they manage to lock down the internet, “independent journalists” can still go out into the field and report those embarrassing stories about soldiers fragging their officers, “burning down the village to save it”, rampant corruption, REMFs, FUBARs, and all the other atrocities that occur when putting down a popular uprising.
Keep fighting and don’t listen to the bullshit coming over the camp loudspeakers. Tell the “briefers” to shove it.