[The Hill] A former director of the CIA under President George W. Bush writes that Fox News host Sean Hannity is a "true propagandist."
Michael Hayden, who led the CIA under Bush from 2006 to 2009, told Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes in an email sent over the weekend that "Hannity has entered the pantheon of a true propagandist."
"And his behavior reminds me of a conversation I had with a political office in the mid-1980s when I was an air attaché to Bulgaria," he continued.
"I asked this officer what truth was to him," Hayden said. "He responded without hesitation, "Truth is what serves the party." And there you have it."
Hayden was responding to a Hannity tweet on Friday praising WikiLeaks under the hashtag #freejulianassange and #freeinternet.
#1
The FSU had a somewhat similar view of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was subsequently expelled from the Soviet Union. Perhaps Hannity should be expelled from the United States.
#3
Hannity is an opinion guy. He's not a news guy who breaks news, he's not a political officer implementing policy. He's a guy that has opinions (some are probably ill-informed) and who speaks his mind for money.
This former CIA guy is an idiot or he has a grudge.
#5
This former CIA guy is an idiot or he has a grudge.
Posted by rjschwarz
He's a realist. He knows that if Trump is elected, General Mike Flynn will be the next Director, CIA and there will likely be a house cleaning and change of direction.
'Change in direction' meaning an end to the regime change tactics of the past 60 years.
#8
Good question rj. Few of these people ever leave the community entirely. They are wedded to cause and well networked, die hard agency bureaucrats. He would not even be weighing in if he did not enjoy the celebrity of his previous assignment. Pro-Trump or Anti-Trump, none of these people should be tossing around their comments. These agencies should be 'apolitical' or as much so as possible. Just my humble opinion.
[GP] Thanks to Wikileaks we now know that at least 65 mainstream reporters were working closely with the Clinton campaign this election year. They were invited to top elitist dinners with Hillary Campaign Chairman John Podesta or Chief Campaign strategist Joel Benenson.
Con't. Baskets of "irredeemable deplorables"... they must be stopped ! 65 MSM reporters? Sounds like an under-count to me...
[Spectator] Obama and his crew will soon be swept into the dustbin of history. If only we had the chance of a successor who would engage the world on the terms we did between 1952 and 1988. Facing up to three Evil Empires is a tall task we have to perform. But there is no prospect of such a leader at hand.
#4
My prediction is the Obama will last, maybe a year on the lecture circuit, but then even the libtards will tire of his condescending tirades and scoldings. so he will then retire to some backwater place and act up just for his fix of attention whoreness.
[FEE.org] The most filiopietistic defenders of the social-democratic nation state have regarded Donald Trump as their black beast since he stepped into politics. So surely they are thrilled by his probable decline and fall?
Not quite. In fact, there is a growing sense of panic on the part of old-time “progressives” that the political system, the policy consensus, and the moral credibility of big government itself are no longer sustainable propositions. The emergence of Trump has become their exhibit A. “How could this have happened?” they ask themselves. What is so fundamentally unstable about the system we’ve created that so many seem willing to try something, anything, else?
His success, however temporary, has been to contribute to a growing sense of panic that public respect for government is at an all-time low.
Perhaps, they worry, our elections have become nothing more than entertainment but otherwise completely ineffective methods of engineering consent. Without that consent, the stability of core institutions of command-and-control is no longer sustainable.
It’s not just that Trump was nominated. It is too simple an explanation to say he was a singular event, that his success, however temporary, was his alone. No one can imagine that anything like this would have happened in the 1950s, for example, at the high point of the American political consensus. What has happened to the health of the public sector that has enabled these sorts of unthinkables to happen in the first place?
It’s No Longer Working
Keep the stakes in mind. The experiment with a central state that knows no limits to its power – controlling every interaction, permissioning or forbidding every choice – is little more than 100 years old. Nearly the whole of the bureaucratic, interventionist, regulatory, welfare-warfare state is a 20th-century creation. It was made by legislatures, judges, and ruling executives.
What is made by law cannot be as sticky a part of the social structure as that which emerges from voluntary action. It can therefore be unmade. And much of what they built is under serious pressure: fast approaching bankruptcy (Social Security to Obamacare), a self-evident failure (public schooling and the Iraq war), and being outrun by more innovative structures in the private sector (P2P technologies and distributed power).
Without this backdrop, consider the alarm of Andrew O’Hehir at Salon. The meaning of his piece depends on how you read it. He is describing disaster from his point of view. I read it and think: let it be so!
#1
What is so fundamentally unstable about the system we’ve created that so many seem willing to try something, anything, else?
Unintended consequences? You are not as smart as you think. You elitist pr!cks are living in a cocoon of your own making. You have been listening for too long to the propaganda echo chamber which you have created. Your criminal house of cards is crumbling. If not this election, it will happen soon--this criminality cannot sustain itself. The pitchforks are coming.
#2
As Mr. Fix It (Jeff Rovin), the Clinton "fixer" says the National Enquirer has become the truthful newspaper of record and the NYTs has become The National Enquirer. Mr. Fixer, Jeff Rovin. Look for Rovin to get shifted to the obituary section of the paper.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
