Why things are just all F*cked up

Sterling Newberry on Why things are just all F*cked up

This morning we get an ample demonstration of why the world is all fucked up from Slate.com. On the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we get several people talking about how they got Iraq wrong. Instead, they get getting wrong wrong, and, frankly, the fact that all of them are still well paid members of
the commentariat, shows that America, and the American elites, have learned
absolutely nothing.

Let's start with why Iraq went wrong: it was a swindle from the beginning. . . .

The reality, and realism should be the stock and trade of a liberal hawk, is that Bush could not have executed on any
successful plan in Iraq, because he was not committed to success, but to his success. His success was to either create a permanent Republican majority, or protecting the downside, make it so that the next Democrat could do nothing
other than sit in a holding pattern until the next good hair Republican took office and started the attempt all over again.

So this is why we are in a mess: we don't have leadership, but salesmanship. These people don't represent any genuine vein of inchoate public opinion, but instead have the job of selling swindles to a public whose opinion is disorganized. The public, for its part thinks of things in different terms, and is often in capable of forming a coherent public counter weight to the manipulations of elites.

Instead the same people who got Iraq wrong are now trying to march to the front of the next parade. Slate itself is descending in a spiral. It has not given space to one critical voice that rose up against the chorus of of a neo-con America, and as such, it consists of people who are trying to tell us that they are qualified
to get things right, because they have such a long track record of geting things wrong.

Dominance of the Media by giant business conglomerates and the corporate executive class that runs them has created this situation, in which the public is intensely dissatisfied, but unable to think or organize effectively. Slate.com is just one manifestation of a badly broken Media, a Media broken on purpose.