For My Friend
Led Zeppelin, Nobody’s Fault But Mine
Earlier today a friend of mine posted a year old video of the breitbart-supported ambush “interview” of Bobn Etheridge, who lost his temper and physically grabbed the “activist” who was hounding him. He headlined this video “Who polices the police? oh YEA…. they police themselves right? internal affairs?? that’s laughable! 
”
When I tried to explain to him that this was a set-up, he responded with video of Madeleine Albright, delivering her notorious “It’s worth it” line about all the Iraqi children that died as a result of our criminal sanctions on that country during the 1990s. He now says I am a member of the though police and involved in a war on ideas. Well, sure, I guess: but “the earth is flat” is also an idea, just not one worth serious consideration because, like the Etheridge video, it’s been thoroughly debunked and those who espouse it are either frauds or ignorant.
I feel bad for my friend: he’s a good guy who’s only looking for some semblance of truth and has been led astray by charlatans like Andrew Breitbart and Alex Jones. And you know, our mainstream “he-said/she-said fake balance” media is in no small way responsible for this.
These sources have so discredited themselves –whether it’s NPR and the NY Times refusing to call “torture” what it is, or the Times publishing Judy Miller’s lies on their front page, or the Washington Post pretending that claims that Obama is a Kenyan Islamofascist Socialist deserve a serious hearing– that when a charlatan like Alex Jones comes along, tells his readers the media is lying to them (which it often is), and then proceeds to tell them a totally different set of lies, his readers believe him, because those who were supposed to tell them the truth did not.
And that’s what happened to my friend. He now believes a pile of bullshit that reaches the moon (which is not, as you may have heard, made of cheese), because the people who should have told him the truth fell down on the job. They didn’t want to offend the people they cover (too busy partying down) or had an agenda of their own, and bought into this bullshit idea that every claim, no matter how wacked out, dishonest, or uninformed, deserves to be treated seriously.
We live in a post-truth society: one of the sadder facts of that is that professional liars are empowered to lead the public down the primrose path to Hell.
