Former CIA Operative Now "Just Like Everybody Else."
WASHINGTON D.C. (Rhodes Media Services)-- In what will surely be a bombshell to the White House, sources today leaked that super-secret, double-hush-hush, tagsies-no-backsies CIA agent Valerie Plame is now no longer a CIA agent.
According to reports, two people who have known Plame for years confirmed her departure from the CIA on Friday, prompting many to question who those two unknown sources were, and why they leaked the name of a civilian who is now just like everybody else.
"In this day and age, with civil rights being stripped away like the clothes from an exotic dancer, we simply can not have people leaking the names of civilians to the press," said Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. "We must stand in support of privacy rights, like the support a brass pole provides for particularly nubile, unclothed women!"
Fitzgerald later apologized for his confusing analogy, saying that a recent recreational visit to a certain unnamed establishment may have been clouding his thinking.
Today's report is brought to you by the Internet. Perhaps you've heard of it? It's an electronic medium reportedly invented by one Al Gore, for the sole purpose of downloading illicit images of high profile celebrities in varying stages of undress.
It kind of just took on a mind of its own from there.
I use the Internet a lot. I use it at work, and I use it at home, which means I'm plugged into the Internet roughly 14 hours a day. That translates into a lot of Web-based advertising being beamed at my face.
I largely think I'm immune to online advertisements, although studies have been done that indicate I'm more susceptible than I may accept. Then again, studies have been done on the brittleness of cookies, so apparently there are studies conducted about pretty much everything, so studies can just go take a flying leap.
One type of online advertising that I do find hard to ignore, however, are pop-ups. I'm not saying that I actually pay attention to pop-up ads, but I do have to close the windows once they pop-up, in what amounts to an online game of digital "whack-a-mole."
It occurred to me that, on any given 14 hour online day, I probably close anywhere between 20 and 1,700 pop-up advertisements, and at the end of the day, I couldn't honestly tell anyone what any of those pop-ups were even advertising.
So, today my valued reader, I took it upon myself to actually take note of any pop-ups and actually report back to you, so you know what's hot and popping up online these days.
9:47 a.m. -- An advertisement for Orbitz Games, featuring the eternal question: "Where's my hotel?" We've all been there, haven't we? Stumbling out of an all night poker game in some back alley dive, your wallet empty, stinking of cheap booze and cigarettes, with several different shades of lipstick on your collar. You flag down the first car you see and blearily ask the driver "Where's my hotel?" And your house is only a block away.
10:57 a.m. -- VacationsToGo.com, touting "Save up to 75% on last minute cruises." Yes, for those of us with schedules as fluid as water, we can just hop on one of those last minute cruises. On a lark! Your boss encourages spontaneous week-long vacations. Heck he's packing your bags for you!
1:21 p.m. -- CitiBank pops up, saying "Sing the rewards of a job well done." How does one sing a reward? Citi doesn't take the time to answer such grammatically nuanced questions. They're too busy pointing out that you get a free iPod Shuffle when you get a CitiBusiness Card. Oh, sure, the interest rates are going to kill you, but at least you're jamming on your complimentary iPod.
2:35 p.m. -- LowerMyBills.com, with an odd ad featuring a picture of a roaring lion. And what is the lion roaring? "Refinance Now!" of course. Because, as everyone knows, lions are the go-to species when it comes refinancing. For retirement investment, you rely on spider monkeys. For car insurance, it's gotta be the gazelle.
4:10 p.m. -- UnderToneNetworks.com, advertising the little-known IN:NYC credit card, telling me to "Earn rewards to eat, drink & play in NYC hotspots." Sounds like a good deal, I guess, provided I live in New York City, which I don't. Somehow, I get the feeling I'm not the target audience for the ad.
5:39 p.m. -- I'm at home, where my Web surfing differs considerably from my work-related Web surfing. My first pop-up of the evening. . . well, I won't get into it. Suffice it to say, I was offerred the opporunity to grow a larger body part. But, honestly, what would I do with a longer arm?
7: 43 p.m. -- Two pop-ups at once, one for a Texas Hold 'em online offer, another being an ad for a Hold 'em poker strategy guide. Something tells me I may be a little too into Texas Hold 'em.
There was much more, of course but, this being a a clean blog and all, I won't delve into some of the more seedier pop-ups. Suffice it to say, there must be a lot of people with abnormally long arms out there.
So I'm linking, once again, to this Christmas classic, which gets sent to me via a gazillion forwarded e-mails a day come this time of year.
Ryan says: Saddam's not afraid of execution: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10318347/
Ryan says: Good to know.
Caroline says: Execution is cheaper than a shoe of an Iraqi?
Ryan says: Bumper sticker.
Caroline says: If I ever heard one
Ryan says: So many car accidents from people trying to figure that one out.
Caroline says: No doubt.
Ryan says: People standing in Pay Less thinking "This is a great deal, but execution would be cheaper."
Caroline says: Pay Lesser Executions.
Okay, so Nick Coleman has apparently realized his writing blows goats or something, and hasn't written any of his usual tripe in nearly a month. *sacrifices a chicken and prays for a continuance of this* Unfortunately, the Star-Tribune op-ed writers are just as thick in the cranium as Ol' Nick, so I'll dabble in a little unusual Sunday fisking, just so I can walk around the rest of the day and know I did SOMETHING.
On Wednesday at the Naval Academy, President Bush said, "Advancing the cause of freedom and democracy in the Middle East begins with ensuring the success of a free Iraq."
Nothing sets the tone more than yet another derisive sneer at the concepts of freedom and democracy. Catch words, nothing more.
Yet that same morning the credibility of America's dedication to ensuring a "free Iraq" was undercut by information in a Los Angeles Times article, later picked up by other newspapers: The U.S. military has been writing positive news stories, disguising their American origins and getting them placed in Iraqi newspapers.
In other news, media organizations around America also reproduce press releases, virtually verbatim, from practically every business in America. Also, the next Harry Potter book is almost guaranteed to result in a media blitz carefully orchestrated by the Harry Potter PR machine. The key bit the Strib ignores from the LA Times article?
Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments,
OH NO, the horror! Articles that are basically factual, but biased! Kind of like, you know, every media outlet in the WORLD. Can't have any positive news reaching people. That would have the unacceptable result of providing hope and optimism. That would be bad. Back to the Strib:
Through the U.S.-created Baghdad Press Club, American officers also have been paying friendly Iraqi journalists hundreds of dollars a month. How much they get depends on the number of pro-American stories they produce.
Hmm, so the free market seems alive and well in Iraq, it seems. One wonders, if al-Queda operatives were found to be paying Iraqi media outlets to present their stories, whether the L.A. Times and the Strib would be so keen to criticize. I'm guessing it wouldn't even be a blip on their radar.
It's beyond us how anyone can square efforts to turn the fledgling "free press" in Iraq into an American propaganda mouthpiece with the effort to export American democracy and the values that undergird it.
Oh, it's beyond them, is it? So is logic, apparently. Hey, Strib? Consult any U.S. propaganda of the WW II era, and you'll see obvious examples of just this sort of information war going on all over the place. Yet it's beyond them. Historians, they ain't. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the Strib, and many left-leaning media outlets, are not only clueless about how wars are fought, they have absolutely no idea what a war actually is. Beyond bullets and bombs, they're basically retarded.
Of course, this administration has used variants of these techniques at home to great effect, and to journalism's great shame.
This coming from a journalistic medium that hires Nick Coleman, and then actually prints his stuff. Journalistic shame? You're soaking in it.
This is the same administration that was caught paying American "journalists" large sums to promote the president's marriage initiative and No Child Left Behind Act.
Yes, to "journalists" who basically preached to their already won-over choirs. The Bush administration is hardly unique in this respect, either.
Those behind these efforts seem to have missed class when the basics of American democracy were explained -- especially the part about the essential role of a free and untrammeled press.
Hey, they were free NOT TO accept the money, right? Where's the trammeling here?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most rambling paragraph in the history of op-eds:
The continuing story about the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame has illuminated the great skill with which administration operatives have used the tantalizing narcotic of high-level access to coax feckless Washington journalists into suspending the critical faculties so essential to doing their jobs well.
Holy fucking shit. I love how, since the Strib has no apparent Washington correspondents of note, they still seem to know exactly what's going on with Washington journalists.
That helps explain why the national press did such a bad job of measuring prewar information about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs against reality.
You get that? It's the PRESS' job to measure prewar intelligence? Move over CIA, NSA, and every worldwide government intelligence agency. It's up to the PRESS to investigate such things. One can only shudder to imagine Nick Coleman and Maureen Dowd heading up the investigation of Iran's nuclear capabilities.
That failure in turn illuminates just how important an independent, aggressive, questioning press is to the effective functioning of a democracy -- here as well as in Iraq.
Nixon! Oh, for the days of Nixon! When we in the press actually amounted to something!
The U.S. State Department understands that. It is spending millions trying to develop professional, independent Iraqi media, only to now learn that the U.S. military is spending millions to achieve just the opposite.
Wait a minute. Just one minute here. Millions? Where did they get that figure? From the L.A. Times article we learn only that some journalists are paid hundreds of dollars a month to print pro-American, BASICALLY FACTUAL, articles. How does that transmogrify into millions of dollars? Is this the type of result we can expect once we turn over weapons intelligence gathering to Nick Coleman and Maureen Dowd?
That is simply bizarre. And it is another big kick in the teeth to American credibility around the world.
My mouf hurtsf afterff geffing kickedf in the teef.
And now, get ready for a segue-fest:
How on Earth can the United States seek to promote freedom, democracy and the rule of law when it is repeatedly shown to violate those very values -- by the way it treats those it has detained in the war on terror, by its misleading use of questionable intelligence in promoting an unnecessary war, by its highhanded refusal to play any longer by rules of international conduct it was instrumental in creating and by its deliberate efforts to undermine press independence?
So you see, ladies and gentlemen, paying to have BASICALLY FACTUAL information reproduced in Iraqi media outlets is tantamount to torture. And now the Strib will trot out the tired memes of "misleading" and "questionable intelligence" that have been debunked so many times, it's like a kick to the teeth to see them in print yet again. Oh, and just a niggling note here, but the word "earth" IS NOT CAPITALIZED!
With notable exceptions -- particularly the Knight Ridder Washington bureau -- the American press has ignored too many wake-up calls, including the Judith Miller fiasco, the Swift Boat vets, Jeff Gannon, the Plame affair and the entire Iraq disaster.
So many lefty talking points, it's almost as if the Strib is getting paid to. . . never mind.
The revelations of military propaganda operations in Iraq should be the last straw. If this cynical effort to undermine journalism doesn't finally cause the mainstream media to get back to doing their job the way it should be done, what will?
Yeah, this horrible, HORRIBLE revelation that the U.S. military conducts propaganda operations should really jump start the mainstream media. Why, such a thing has never happened before. Good God.
