Ministry of Truth?

[Dill]

(05-05-2022, 05:48 AM)hollodero Wrote: Oh yeah I owed an answer here... my answer is what Dill just said. 

A few more thoughts on Benghazi issue, Hollo, to more clearly connect it to the thread topic. I’d have made the extreme disparity in accountability between then/now Republican/Democrat more visible, had I focused on the degree of planning and direction exercised by top political leadership in comparable disasters, as opposed to mid management.

Thought experiment: imagine we send Hilary back to 1975 to be a president, during the chaotic fall of Saigon. Two weeks after that blow to U.S. Cold War superpower prestige on her account, she’s informed the Khmer have seized the U.S.’ first container ship—the Mayaguez.

She can’t claim the request for aid never crossed her desk, as she was immediately in conference with her NSC and the Pacific fleet, ok’ing rescue attempts against the advice of the admiral responsible for that region, who wanted to wait for a nearby carrier to arrive, affording a full-spectrum response.

The discovery that Marines had been dropped onto the wrong island, held by 100+ battle-hardened, fanatical child soldiers bunkered in with heavy weapons—minutes AFTER the Mayaguez and crew, held elsewhere, had been released—took U.S. prestige down yet another notch. A military morale breaker too, given that some Marines, dead and alive, were left behind, with the living remainder themselves needing rescue, as their helicopters had been downed immediately. Then the execution (and likely torture) of the captured Marines, followed by no punitive action. This is FAR more serious than the case of an ambassador who refused security details from Tripoli and launched out on his own on a day of expected unrest—on Hilary’s “watch.”

With the Mayaguez disaster clearly following from Hilary’s decision, would the right wing in ‘75 demand her resignation? Or would her poll numbers rise afterwards, as did Ford’s? I’m guessing the latter, because something present in our current politics did not exist then, or only so in kernel form, on the fringe, with no voice in the “liberal” press.

One could also reverse this experiment: bring Reagan back to 2012. How might Hannity have responded if 4* people (as opposed to 241) died on his “watch”—the standard applied to Hilary? Would he demand Reagan apologize to each of the families? Would he praise McCarthy/Republicans for using the investigations to diminish poll numbers? I’m guessing no, as he had the opportunity to do that on Trump’s “watch” five years later, but did not.

What is being compared here is not Reagan vs Hilary, but the U.S. electorate pre-1986 and now, in order raise this question—

Do millions of U.S. voters groomed to act on Fox/Trump prompts (NOT the “fake news”)—prompts easily mimicked on social media by our adversaries—pose a threat to national security and democracy worth addressing?

In this context, is public education designed to challenge mal-and disinformation the greater threat? Who would want us to think so? That there is even controversy about this suggests much confusion about the nature and requirements of democratic governance. I fear that voters coming of age post Limbaugh and Gingrich have no memory of time when this kind of noise wasn’t part of our elections and, worse, attribute it to “both sides.”

*Or maybe just 2, if you figure the CIA Annex is not “on Hilary’s watch,” but the CIA Director’s. “But BOTH were on Obama’s watch!” some might respond. But O. was not destined to run in the 2016 election. Hilary needed to be stuck with that bill.