Battleangel

I do not have high hopes when it comes to the American system fixing itself and so I do not pay that much attention. Plus it’s hard to care when the hoopla starts nearly two years before the actual election. But last week’s massive disinformation campaign involving presidential hopeful Barack Obama does nevertheless merit a closer look.

It started for many people when they turned on the Fox News morning program “Fox & Friends” and heard a breathless report that Sen. Barack Obama “spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father – as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa.” It turns out that that one sentence contained no fewer than five falsehoods: Obama was not raised by his father, his father left the family when he was two, his father was not a practicing Muslim, Obama was not raised a Muslim, and he was not educated in a madrassa.

And it is only going to get worse. What’s more, the damage, as usual, is already done.

Years after George Bush himself admitted that there is no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, I continue to meet people who believe just the opposite — that the original implications furthered by the White House and the talk-radio preachers were true, and that the no-link concession was something somehow forced on Bush and the likes of Fox by hyper-cautious media lawyers and lefty journalists who, it is assumed, harbor some secret allegiance to Saddam Hussein and/or the cause of Islamic terrorism in general.

And the new tone that has been set will skew the perception not only of said candidate but also radicalize the election process a little further, sidetracking any serious issues or ideas if there ever were any to begin with. The media pundits who run the circus are of course allowed to do so with impunity. No libel suits will be forthcoming, mainly because these pundits are in a state of semi-journalism, where we are expected to know they can’t be trusted. 

The Obama incident was a perfect example. After Fox outlets, Insight magazine and the Roger Ailes morning vehicle Fox and Friends erroneously reported that a source in “Hillary Clinton’s camp” had uncovered that Barack Obama had been schooled in a “madrassa” in his youth in Indonesia, CNN dispatched a reporter to the school in question and found that the tale was totally false, that there were religion classes only once a week at the school and that the school had not even a hint of Wahabbite influence. Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s camp denied having anything to do with the story. “They made it up,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said.

If one were to return to the big picture for a moment then the moral of the story must be that Obama is particularly dangerous to the US establishment. Perhaps he does indeed have the strength of character to make a difference. But even if he had that character, overcame the opponents, not to mention his own party, turned out to be the second coming of Christ, and wasn’t changed in the process, he’d still be in charge of the most hated nation in the world. A nation with abysmal finances and a bad case of imperial overstretch not to mention the disconnect between faux democracy at home and imperialism abroad.