DC "blindsided?"

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Goodbye to All That

Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 9:50am, February 7, 2011.

Pox Americana
Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East
By Tom Engelhardt

"As we've watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them....

Still, make no mistake, there’s a story in a Washington stunned and "blindsided," in an administration visibly toothless and in disarray as well as dismayed over the potential loss of its Egyptian ally, “the keystone of its Middle Eastern policy,” that’s so big it should knock your socks off..."

As I was reading this I was reminded of an article that I read a couple of weeks ago:

Maddow Shows How the "National" Media Isn't National At All by: David Sirota Thu Jan 20, 2011 at 13:30

"Last night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow rightly asked a taboo question of our "national" media: Why has it largely ignored what the FBI says is a major terrorist bombing attempt on Spokane, Washington? In the segment, you can see she cites examples of the "national" media hyperventilating about bomb scares that ended up being false alarms. She cites these examples to wonder why, in the face of a bomb scare that's actually real, the same "national" media has ignored the Spokane story? ..."

If the NY-DC media bubble cannot inform the people of the United States about danger, how can we expect them to stop tripping over their dicks internationally? They may understand campaign contributions, election cycles and the coming quarter's earnings but the effin megalomaniacs are so myopically focused on those things that they can't even see how dangerous they are to the world.

And, Oh, yeah, I'm getting better at spotting CIA planted stories, especially with the Egypt thing going on. Some of the absolute nonsense I have read in the last couple of weeks is fucking hiliarous.

Asia Times / By Pepe Escobar 16 COMMENTS
Why the US Fears Arab Democracy
As much as Mubarak is a slave to US foreign policy, Obama is boxed in by geopolitical imperatives and enormous corporate interests he cannot even dream of upsetting.