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Great takedown of New York Times warmonger Thomas Friedman by Matt Taibbi. Here's the News Blog's edit:
'What we have to remember about America's half-baked propaganda machine is that, dumb as it is, it always keeps its eye on the ball. The war in Iraq is lost, everyone knows that, but there are future wars to think about. ... we always have to make sure that the excuse for the next war is woven into the autopsy of the current military failure. That's why to this day we're still hearing about how Vietnam was lost because a) the media abandoned the war effort b) the peace movement undermined the national will and c) the public, and the Pentagon, misread the results of the Tet offensive, seeing defeat where there actually was a victory.
'After a few decades of that, we were ready to go to war again [in Iraq] -- all we had to do, we figured, was keep the cameras away from the bloody bits, ignore the peace movement, and blow off any and all bad news from the battlefield. And we did all of these things for quite a long time in Iraq, but, maddeningly, Iraq still turned out to be a failure.
'That left the war apologists in a bind. If after fixing all of the long-held Vietnam excuses Iraq could still blow up in our faces, that must mean that we not only misjudged Iraq, but we were wrong about why Vietnam failed, too. Now, if we're ever going to pull one of these stunts again, we're going to need to come up with a grander, even more outlandish excuse for why both wars were horrible, bloody failures.
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'[According to Friedman] both Vietnam and Iraq failed not because they were stupid, vicious occupations of culturally alien populations that despised our very presence and were willing to sacrifice scads of their own lives to send us home. No, the problem was that we didn't make an effort to "re-evaluate tax and spending policies" and "shift resources" into an "all-out" war effort.
'We're talking about one of the richest men in media, a guy who in recent years got still richer beating the drum for this war from his $9.3 million, 11,400 square-foot mansion in suburban Maryland. He is married to a shopping mall heiress worth nearly $3 billion; the Washingtonian says he is part of one of the 100 richest families in America. And yet he has the balls to turn around and tell us that the pointless, asinine war he cheerleaded for failed because we didn't sacrifice enough for it.
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'[T]rust me, the myth is going to be that you didn't cough up enough for the war. It's your fault we failed, not Tom Friedman's.'
Reddy Kilowatt commercial (1950s). From a time when we needed to be told about the virtues of electricity. (via WFMU)
mosaic GIF - artist unknown - 15 times
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bubble GIF - artist unknown - 9 times
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Baby Sloth [YouTube]
Unrelated to baby sloths: I was recently invited by another blog to do some critical writing for it. I was flattered by the request but replied that I was mainly focused on my own art and music and wasn't really doing reviewing outside my own domain. (My FAQ page sort of explains why--art world damage.) I said I was happy to have anything on this page reblogged, so it wasn't really a no. The person who emailed definitely took it as a "no," though. There is much good writing about art on the Net (as well as crap) that's yours for the asking--I don't know why it should have to "originate" on the site that publishes it. What's wrong with a collage of writing? Kathy Acker-like. Some blog items don't get picked up because they're too "controversial" (woo, scary). I appreciate someone "having my back" occasionally, as they say in the Army, when I go out on a limb and...express an opinion. Paddy Johnson could probably use a pat for daring to... have guts. (She called Queen Roberta a bad writer! No one in the New York art world ever stands up to the Queen and Jer.)