The Whores of the Pentagon

Ken Silverstein has a piece up on Harper's website about the incestuous relationship between the military analysts, the right-wing bloggers who have been parroting the Pentagon's talking points, and the Pentagon itself. Although some of the piece is along the lines of "I had this story last year," it is worth revisiting, for as Silverstein notes, the whores were not limited to just those who were regurgitating the Pentagon's line on the news networks.

They're not "journalists" or "analysts" or even "independent bloggers." They are propagandists. If Josef Goebbels were still alive, he'd be chuckling with approval, for even as many of the self-styled analysts were privately noting that things were not going well in Iraq, they continued to spout the party line of the Pentagon and the Bush Administration. In that regard, they followed the tradition of Baghdad Bob.

You can trust what is being said in the news conferences and briefings held by the Department of Defense and Central Command and the Bush Administration about as much as you could have trusted the garbage that was shoveled out in the "Five O'Clock Follies" during the Vietnam War.

Which is to say: You cannot trust them at all. They are interested only in promoting and justifying what they do, they are "catapulting the propaganda," as Chimpy once put it. It is a sales job, that is all. They are as trustworthy as a used-car salesman wearing a "full Cleveland".

(I take that back, sort of. What I just wrote was insulting to used-car salesmen. They certainly are more ethical than Pentagon spokesweasels, as used-car salesmen can be sued for consumer fraud.)