Saturday, March 29, 2014

Empire's War on Reality

I sure am glad I wasn't the only one telling the Emperor he had no clothes. The boy in Hans Christian Andersen's tale was lucky; in this day and age, he might have been hauled away for "diversity training".

Perhaps that is why the mainstream media are still silent on the (to put it mildly) Brussels gaffe. The Washington Post even quoted it without comment (!) while spinning Mr. Obama's speech as being a "generous spin" on the Iraq War. Fox News settled for reprinting the article written by two journalists at Breitbart London.

Just in case someone missed it, here is Mr. Obama's behind-the-looking-glass claim, made in the March 26 speech in Brussels:
"Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized – not outside the boundaries of international law but in careful cooperation with the United Nations, and with Kosovo’s neighbors."
And just to be clear, none of this ever happened. There was no UN-supervised referendum, no "careful cooperation" with anyone (least of all "Kosovo's neighbors", whoever that might be referring to), and no staying within international law. Why else would it have been necessary to bend it?

One possible explanation, as I noted yesterday, was that the Emperor's speechwriter mixed up the (nonexistent) referendum in Kosovo with the 2006 vote in Montenegro - a dirty affair in which the separatists barely scraped up the 55% majority arbitrarily decided upon by the EU. Bad enough when retired diplomats can't tell Kosovo and Bosnia apart, but the Emperor's own speechwriters mixing up his Balkans clients?

Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute may sound harsh when he calls this a "war on history," but he might actually be too lenient. This isn't just a war on history, but a war on reality. Remember Karl Rove's tirade to Ron Suskind, about the Empire shaping reality? Apparently this kind of delusional thinking is not just the province of Republicans and neocons. The party currently in power in Washington very much believes in the power of conjuring "reality" with words and images: Hope and change. Keep your doctor. Russia is an aggressor. There was a referendum in Kosovo. And so on.

The two experts interviewed by Breitbart reporters expressed expectations that the White House would issue a retraction, or at least an apology. That has not happened. Nor is it likely to happen, as that would undermine Washington's projected aura of infallibility - the only thing still hiding the fact that the Empire has no clothes.

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