.
A few excerpts from that vid clip RocketMan inserted a couple posts ago. A few interesting bits, in some instances echoing the refrains -- and
frustrations -- a number of us have been repeating for 2+ years.
[I remain cynical of every media source, including -- to a lesser degree -- Democracy Now. Still, it's a much better option than any of the other 'network news' options]
Glenn Greenwald:
...let me just say a couple of things; first of all, prior to Bob Mueller’s appointment, I was calling for a full-scale investigation in which all of the facts that the conclusion of the investigation would be publicly revealed, so that we would stop having to rely on media leaks that the CIA and the NSA and the FBI were engineering and manipulating and lying to us, as we now know, so that we couldn’t see the full picture, so I continue to believe that we should see the full Mueller report, I support that completely. Secondly, let me say as well that I believe that Donald Trump is one of the most corrupt people ever to occupy the White House; I'm certain that he's guilty of all kinds of crimes as president… war crimes, financial crimes as a business person. One of the reasons why those of us who were so angry about this obsession on Russia and collusion, aside from the fact that it was so dangerous to ratchet up tensions between two nuclear-armed powers this way instead of trying to forge a peace between these two countries, is precisely because it took the oxygen away from all of the things that the Trump administration is doing that is so damaging, in lieu of this idiotic moronic Tom Clancy type espionage thriller, where we were talking about Putin blackmailing Donald Trump with “PeePee tapes”, and Donald Trump being a Russian agent since 1987, which was a cover story that was on New York Magazine, that Chris Hayes put on MSNBC.
Just all kinds of moronic conspiracies that we love to mock other country’s media for circulating and disseminating, to drown out our airwaves in our discourse for three years, preventing us from focusing on the real substantive damage that the Trump administration is doing, that Donald Trump's corruption entails. The media chose to focus on this, everybody knows this.
We now have a full-scale 20-month investigation by somebody that everybody stated was a man of great integrity, who would get to the bottom of all of this, who had full subpoena power, and yet to keep trying to imply -- which is totally false -- that all Mueller said was, “oh it just doesn't rise to the level of criminality”. That is not what he said. He said: after 20 months of a full-scale investigation, which by the way, included hours of interrogating Donald Trump Jr. before Congress, all of the transcripts of which were made available to Mueller, which he could have prosecuted Trump Jr. on for perjury and obstruction had he lied about anything [but he chose not to], he said “after reviewing all of this evidence, I am concluding that this did not happen”. Not that “it doesn't rise to the level where I can criminally prosecute.”
He's saying there was no collusion. The game is over and it's time to be honest about it.
…
Rachel Maddow, the most influential liberal TV host in the country, every single night misled millions of liberals into believing something that was totally false, and there will be no media consequences for it. That is extremely grave and serious no matter how much is true about how corrupt Donald Trump is in his financial dealings, or any of the other stuff that people are now trying to deflect our attention on.
Goodman: I want to ask you to imagine for a moment if this investigation didn't happen for the last three years, or whether it did but the press didn't pay it much attention until Mueller came up with his results, as he has now… what the press could have been doing, you alluded to it in the last answer, dealing with issues, for example we're moving into the 2020 presidential election: what could the media have done, if the media wasn't saying it was simply stolen from her, but instead what if the media raised exactly which policies the Democrats were representing that might have led to her defeat?
Greenwald:
Right, that's the question: why did millions of people vote for a complete joke of a game show host, and how did the Democrats lose the presidency to one of the most embarrassing spectacles of a candidate in US history? What is the prevailing ideology of the ruling class that has turned millions and millions of people in this country into such angry citizens that they either refuse to vote, or vote for the person who promises to burn down the entire system? Why are they so angry? What has happened to their Economic Security?
…all those kinds of questions could have been asked and should have been asked but it all got drowned out because we were all so much more fascinated by the superficial kind of very appealing and melodramatic espionage thriller that has completely destroyed the credibility of the US media and so tragically vindicated Donald Trump in a way that probably is the greatest gift that has been given to him throughout his entire presidency.
Goodman:
As we discuss the Mueller report we’d like to turn to Noam Chomsky when he appeared on Democracy Now last August…
Chomsky:
…so this huge issue of interference and ‘pristine elections’; did the Russians interfere in our election? An issue of overwhelming concern, that in most of the rest of the world, that's almost a joke. First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our elections whatever the Russians may have done barely counts as compared with what another state does openly, brazenly, and with enormous support: Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, even to the point where the Prime Minister of Israel Netanyahu goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies, which is what happened with Obama & Netanyahu in 2015.
Goodman:
Glenn Greenwald can you respond?
Greenwald:
Well, that's been the other critical point this entire time, this kind of melodrama over the 'outrage' that any country would dare to interfere with our 'sacred and glorious' democracy, when, as Noam Chomsky just pointed out, and has spent the last 40 years pointing out, the United States has done very little since the end of World War Two but going around the world interfering in every single democracy that they can find -- including the country in which I'm currently living, which is Brazil, where they overthrew a democratically elected government in 1964 and then proceeded to impose a military regime for 21 years -- and also Russia where they openly boasted about helping to elect Boris Yeltsin because he would privatize everything and that would be good for U.S. industry, or even agitating anti-Putin resistance in parliamentary elections under Hillary Clinton's reign as Secretary of State; this doesn't make it right for Russia to do it, but we've never kept in perspective the fact that interfering or meddling in other countries elections or governance is not some grave aberrational never-before-heard drama that the entire world has to stop and lament and put an end to. It's normal business. We're currently right now in the process of trying to change the government of Venezuela openly, and have done so over and over around the world, and that's why Noam Chomsky says that all of this moral outrage of Americans
at the idea that somebody would interfere in our 'democracy' has made the U.S. a laughingstock to the hundreds of millions of people, billions in fact, who live in countries where the US has done this, and far far worse, for decade after decade after decade.
[they neglected to mention election meddling by internal players during
our own elections, as well -- the meddling goes on "in our own backyard" as well as overseas]
