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Matt Lauer Serves Up Offensive Cheese

Like a block of processed cheese, the news served up by the “Today” show is cheap, loaded down with preservatives of convention, artificial color and meaning, and while sounding very much authoritative and informed, it ultimately lands in your gut like an unhealthy glob of waste. No where else does the media maintain the status […]

Like a block of processed cheese, the news served up by the “Today” show is cheap, loaded down with preservatives of convention, artificial color and meaning, and while sounding very much authoritative and informed, it ultimately lands in your gut like an unhealthy glob of waste. No where else does the media maintain the status quo of modern-day conformity and the demotic culture better than with the happy clucks of NBC and its flagship morning show, co-hosted by Matt Lauer. Five years after insipidly cooperative networks like NBC and their unreflective “news anchors,” led us haplessly into war like drum majorettes, they still haven’t learned that no matter how much they try to please the right wing talkers, they will never be accepted as anything but deceitful denizens of the liberal loonybin.

That doesn’t matter to Matt, who on Thursday threw out one of the Right’s favorite canards – that only the “far left” gets agitated about pesky “civil liberties” — and by refusing to ask the tough questions and ignorantly taking a guest’s falsehoods at face value, Lauer dopily maintains the insidious trope that post-9/11 surveillance and law enforcement measures have not been abused, that the federal government spying on its citizens without warrant is not only necessary, but all good terror-fearing Americans should want to participate. Just get on board.

Nevermind that the Justice Department’s own inspector general has found that the FBI may have violated the law more than 3,000 times since 2003 in regards to secret wiretapping and other surveillance of Americans, that courts have repeatedly struck down Patriot Act measures as unconstitutional, that there was widespread resistance within the Bush Administration to its secret warrantless wiretapping program at the NSA, that the Congress is still embroiled in a healthy debate over whether the government should give immunity to telecommunications companies that willingly turned over its customers’ private information to the feds without warrant in the years following 9/11. In fact, the House passed a new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] bill late last year without the immunity, 227-189. Safe to say not all of the “yays” hailed from “far left.”

None of that even entered the conversation between Lauer and former CIA agent Michael Sheehan, author of the new Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves. Like an orange blob of cheese, its effect is to make you feel momentarily satisfied without knowing the kind of junk their putting into your head:

From the May 14 edition of NBC’s Today: (emphasis mine)

LAUER: The third point — and this is really the crux of your book here — is that: “Only spying works.” And when you talk about spying, let me just go through some of the things you call for — demand. You say we’ve got to use more undercover agents, informants, wiretapping, email surveillance, the works. The sound you just heard, Michael, is the far left, grabbing for their remote controls, ’cause they say, you’re going to do this, you’re going to trample civil liberties.

SHEEHAN: Well, I hope not, and actually, I believe very firmly you can do both. What you need is good oversight involved. You need oversight within the agencies; you need congressional oversight; oversight from the press — and make sure that when we give our CIA or FBI or NYPD the authority to do wiretaps or do investigations, that they’re not going to abuse it.I don’t think it has been abused over the last seven years. And even when President Bush pushed the NSA wiretapping thing, I think as people began to understand what he was doing, they became — they understood it more. It’s just the way he went about it. I think if we have a little bit more dialogue between the executive branch and the Congress with the American people, we can get through that.

LAUER: And it takes us to the title of you book, which is Crush the Cell, and your thought here is, once you see a cell forming, you break it up before that gang has a chance to dream big.

For a swell takedown, check out Media Matters.org

 

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