The Naked Emperors

Silverfiddle Rant

I stumbled across the fascinating resignation letter written by Army veteran and longtime NBC contributor William Arkin. He's no Trump fan, but he is disgusted with the media's 24/7 Trump bashing. He also excoriates the press for a dangerous lack of independent analysis and criticism of our shambolic, destructive and wasteful foreign policy:

"The longtime contributor said he was alarmed by how the media instinctually responded to Trump’s desire to end U.S. involvement in foreign wars by arguing against it without much thought, leading it “to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war.” (Mediaite)

Those two criticisms--of the press and of the foreign policy establishment--hit home for me because I have been making a similar case for years.

The Infotainment Media Complex Stinks

Our press is a disgraceful rabble of tabloid tattlers, preening prima donnas, partisan cheerleaders, crouching propagandists, hidden agendaists, pseudo-intellectuals, and dime store "experts." They all need to stop taking sides, stop rubbing elbows at cocktail parties with the elite DC grandees, and start grilling them. Daily. We need a press that Questions Everything. 

A people's press would submit our rulers (and the edicts they excrete) to withering examination. And btw, how is it that all those congresspeople abused their staffers, paid them taxpayer money to shut up, and we never heard about it until it somehow slipped past the protective press phalanx that protects their fellow DC elites?

Our Foreign Policy: A Continuous Loop of Insanity

Our foreign policy establishment is a moldy, cob-webbed shelf of crumbling yellow books stuffed full of arrant nonsense and discredited shibboleths.  Arrogance and purblind ignorance make a dangerous combination, and our nation and the world have been paying the price for decades while the press cheerleads and abets.

Here is Arkin's thoughtful but scathing critique of our foreign policy "experts:"

To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested.

Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. 

And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous.

I agree. What say you?