THIS MODERN WORLD

Gary Webb is dead, an apparent suicide.

Webb tried to take a serious look at the ties between US foreign policy in Latin America and the flow of cocaine into the US in those days, and was driven out of journalism for daring to suggest that the US government might have looked the other way while its momentary allies in a proxy war behaved in a less than ethical manner. The New York Times, to its eternal discredit, led the charge. Even the obit, linked above, notes that the series of articles were “later discredited”, which is bullshit. Major newspapers did not “discredit parts of his work” so much as they set up complete straw men and then knocked those straw men right down and declared it a good day’s work done. And in the long run, they may have destroyed a man’s life.

Here’s a cartoon I did about all of this, back in 1996. Not a very good scan, for some reason, but it’s the best available at the moment.

I don’t have time to write a long post responding to David Brooks’ latest compendium of misleading banalities. The short version is: it’s not some irrational fear of “the market” driving my opposition. It’s the very rational understanding that the forces driving Social Security “reform” have no interest in reform whatsoever. You’ve got the Grover Norquist destroy-government wing allied with the conservatarian free-marketeers, both of whom would dearly love to wipe out the last vestiges of the New Deal. (Some chucklehead online recently suggested that Social Security reform began with Clinton. Clinton flirted with a lot of bad right wing ideas, but anyone who claims that he was the one who started this ball rolling is either lying or shockingly misinformed.) It’s not that I don’t trust “the market.” It’s that I don’t trust the “reformers.” And for very good reason.

Check your email. You didn’t specify a cartoon when you ordered a print.

Haven’t we heard this one somewhere before?

The Pentagon is engaged in bitter, high-level debate over how far it can and should go in managing or manipulating information to influence opinion abroad, senior Defense Department civilians and military officers say.

Such missions, if approved, could take the deceptive techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse an adversary and adopt them for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations.

Critics of the proposals say such deceptive missions could shatter the Pentagon’s credibility, leaving the American public and a world audience skeptical of anything the Defense Department and military say – a repeat of the credibility gap that roiled America during the Vietnam War.

The efforts under consideration risk blurring the traditional lines between public affairs programs in the Pentagon and military branches – whose charters call for giving truthful information to the media and the public – and the world of combat information campaigns or psychological operations.

Here:

The first flight test in nearly two years of a planned U.S. missile-defense shield has been scrapped two days in a row this week because of bad weather, the Pentagon said on Friday.

— snip —

The target missile was to be fired in Kodiak, Alaska, to vary engagement angles tested in previous launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The first attempt to conduct the test this week was scrubbed by clouds over Kodiak.

— snip —

“The target launch time and location, the flight trajectory, the point of impact, what the target looks like, and the make-up of other objects in the target cluster have all been known in advance to plot the intercept,” he said. “No enemy would cooperate by providing all that information in advance.”

So the Reagan-era dream of a space umbrella keeping us all safe from harm is about to be realized…as long as the enemy attacks us on a sunny day and gives us the target coordinates in advance.

(Via Bob.)