Mixed Signals: Iranian Show Interferes With Warmonger Imagery
December 1, 2007
No Comments
The catapulters of propaganda in the Bush Regime — and their eager collaborators in the corporate media and throughout the rightwing bootlickosphere — bombard us with relentless images of Iran as a dark and sinister land peopled by black-clad clerics and cranks: raving Hitlerian madmen, bent on the utter destruction of everything good and decent in the world.
So what do you think is one of the most popular TV shows in this hellhole of sectarian savagery? Something like <a target="_blank" href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0607/p01s03-woiq.html"
The departure of John “Bush Boy” Howard from office in Australia is most welcome, of course, but the administration of new Labor Party PM Kevin Rudd may less of a rupture than meets the eye. Rudd has clearly cast himself in the Bill Clinton-Tony Blair mode: a “pragmatist” steering his nominally progressive party firmly toward the right, jettisoning any platforms and principles that might hinder “electability” – i.e., assuring the elite that their wads won’t be threatened if the “progressives” take power.
I’m sure that a great many Americans don’t know who Martin Amis is. If they do, they are more likely to know him as the author of “The Rachel Papers,” which was made into quirky teen-comes-of-age movie years ago, or perhaps as the son of Kingsley Amis, whose acerbic, slightly racy (for their day) novels were once mainstays on the British literary scene. But Martin himself has become something of a Brit mainstay in his middle age, routinely touted as one of the island’s top writers and definitely 
For years now, Britain has been the canary in the mineshaft — or perhaps a patient etherized upon a table — when it comes to the daylight robbery of ancient liberties by a “Terror War” state. In many cases, the “New Labour” regime has been far in advance of the Bushists in the practice of this dark art. Not so much the backroom stuff, of course;