Hasan Minhaj's Full Speech from the White House Correspondents' Dinner 2017

Hasan Minhaj's Full Speech from the White House Correspondents' Dinner 2017

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a9575827/hasan-minhaj-speech-transcript-video-white-house-correspondents-dinner/

By Kaitlin Menza   Apr 30, 2017

Thank you. Wow. Oh my God. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the series finale of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Oh man! My name is Hasan Minhaj, or as I’ll be known in a few weeks, no. 830-287.

Who would’ve thought with everything going on in the country right now, that a Muslim would be standing on this stage, for the ninth year in a row, baby? We had eight years of Barack, what’s another year? I see you, fam! I see you Barry! What you doing right now? You jet-skiing while the world burns? That’s cool, that’s cool. That’s cool.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a correspondent on The Daily Show, on Comedy Central. Now, I see some of you whispering to each other—“What is Comedy Central?” Um, it’s basically an internship for Netflix.

I’d like to thank Jeff Mason and the White House Correspondents’ Association for having me. I would say it is an honor to be here, but that would be an alternative fact. It is not. No one wanted to do this. So of course, it lands in the hands of an immigrant. That’s how it always goes down. No one wanted this gig! No one! Don Rickles diedjust so you wouldn’t ask him to do this gig. R.I.P. to Don Rickles, the only Donald with skin thick enough to take a joke like that. R.I.P. to the legend.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That’s my only Trump joke. I was explicitly told not to go after the administration. I promise you, that was my only trump joke.

It is amazing to be surrounded by some of the greatest journalists in the world, and yet when we all checked into the Hilton on Friday, we all got a USA Today. Every time a USA Today slides underneath my door, it’s like they’re saying, “Hey, you’re not that smart, right?” USA Today is what happens when the coupon section takes over the newspaper. “Is this an article about global warming, or 50 cents off Tide? Either way, the pictures are so pretty!”

Tonight is about defending the First Amendment and the free press, and I am truly honored to be here, even though all of Hollywood pulled out now that King Joffrey’s president, and it feels like the Red Wedding in here. For the record, the W.H.C.A. is a group of journalists that cover the White House. They are not King Joffrey’s goons. So I’m so glad you guys are all here tonight to honor a great American tradition, because we all know that this administration loves deleting history faster than Anthony Weiner when he hears footsteps. So thank you for being here.

OK, listen. I get it, I get it—we gotta address the elephant that is not in the room. The leader of our country is not here. And that’s because he lives in Moscow, and it’s a very long flight. It would be hard for Vlad to make it. Vlad can’t just make it on a Saturday. It’s a Saturday!

As for the other guy, I think he’s in Pennsylvania because he can’t take a joke. Now! For the nine people watching on CSPAN, there also was another elephant in the room—but Donald Trump Jr. shot it and cut off its tail.

You know, a lot of people told me, Hasan, if you go after the administration, it would be petty, unfair, and childish. In other words, presidential. So here we go.

I get why Donald Trump didn’t want to be roasted tonight. By the looks of him, he’s been roasting nonstop for the past 70 years. Historically, the president usually performs at the Correspondents’ Dinner. But I think I speak for all of us when I say he’s done far too much bombing this month.

Now, a lot of people in the media say that Donald Trump goes golfing too much. You guys are always like, “He goes golfing too much!” Which raises a very important question: why do you care? Do you want to know what he’s not doing when he’s golfing? Being president! Let the man putt putt! Keep him distracted! Teach him how to play badminton. Tell him he has a great body for bobsledding. Play him Tic-Tac-Toe. The longer you keep him distracted, the longer we’re not at war with North Korea.

Every time Donald Trump goes golfing, the headline should read: “Trump Golfing, Apocalypse Delayed." Take the W. This is great. I love this. Even if you guys groan, I already hired Kellyanne Conway. She’s going to go on TV on Monday and tell everyone I killed, so it really doesn’t matter.

But I love that everybody’s drinking and having a good time. This is beautiful. You know Donald Trump doesn’t drink, right? Does not touch alcohol. Which is oddly respectable. But think about that. That means every statement, every interview, every tweet, completely sober. How is that possible? We’ve all had that excuse, haven’t we? “What? No, listen babe, I swear to you I was hammered! That’s not who I really am!” What does Donald Trump tell Melania? “Listen, babe, last year on that bus with Billy Bush, that’s exactly who I am.” He tweets at 3 a.m., sober. Who is tweeting at 3 a.m. sober? Donald Trump, because it’s 10 a.m. in Russia. Those are business hours

You know, now that a professional wrestler’s our president, anything is possible. You know, that statement, anything is possible, used to have a positive connotation. Now we’re all like, “anything is possible.” Anything. The news coming out of the White House is so stressful, I’ve been watching House of Cards just to relax. I’m just like, aw, man! A congressman pushed a journalist in front of a moving train? That’s quaint!

Now, it’s not just the president who decided not to show up. His entire administration is not here. Betsy Devos couldn’t be here; she’s busy curating her collection of children’s tears. Now, a lot of people think Betsy Devos is out of touch with working-class America, but you listen to me, and you listen to me right now: every morning, Betsy Devos is up at 5 a.m. putting her children on their flight to school. So don’t you tell me she’s out of touch, OK?

Hey, has anyone see Rick Perry since he became energy secretary? I have a feeling he’s sitting in a room full of plutonium waiting to become Spider-Man. That’s just my hunch.

Now, a lot of people think Steve Bannon is the reason Donald Trump dog whistles to racists. And that is just not true. Ask Steve Bannon. Is Steve Bannon here? I do not see Steve Bannon. I do not see Steve Bannon. Not see Steve Bannon… not-see Steve Bannon… Nazi Steve Bannon.

Frederick Douglass isn’t here, and that’s because he’s dead. Someone please tell the president.

Mike Pence wanted to be here tonight, but his wife wouldn’t let him because apparently one of you ladies is ovulating. So good job, ladies. Because of you, we couldn’t hang out with Mike Pence.

Now Ivanka Trump isn’t here either, and I wish she was. Because if she was here, I would ask her the question that we’re all thinking: why? Why do you support this man? Because I get it. We all love our parents. But we wouldn’t endorse them for president. If someone’s like hey, Hasan, should your dad be president of the United States? I’d be like, my dad? Najmi Minhaj? The guy who tries to return used underwear to Costco? No!

Jeff Sessions couldn’t be here tonight. He was busy doing a pre-Civil War reenactment. On his R.S.V.P. he just wrote, “no.” Just no! Which happens to be his second favorite n-word.

Even Hillary Clinton couldn’t be here tonight. I mean, she could have been here, but I think someone told her the event was in Wisconsin and Michigan. What? You guys! You know, Nate Silver told me that joke would kill. Nate Silver told me there was a 74.1 percent chance of that joke killing. I believed you, Nate! You hear that groan, Nate? I can’t believe I believed you.

OK, enough about House Slytherin. We are here to talk about the truth. It is 2017, and we are living in the golden age of lying. Now’s the time to be a liar, and Donald Trump is liar in chief. And remember, you guys are public enemy no. 1. You are his biggest enemy. Journalists, ISIS, normal-length ties. And somehow, you’re the bad guys. That’s why you gotta keep your foot on the gas. Especially with Sean Spicer, who is not here tonight because I think he’s at home Googling how to fake his own death.

But I love it when you give it to Sean Spicer. Sean Spicer gives press briefings like someone is going through his browser history while he watches. “Stop it, stop it! Stop shaking your head, stop shaking your head! We’ll talk about this tomorrow!” It is the best. Now, you guys are laughing, but realize Sean Spicer’s been doing PR since 1999. He has been doing this job for 18 years, and somehow after 18 years, his go-to move when you ask him a tough question is denying the Holocaust. That is insane. How many people do you know who can turn a press briefing into a full-blown Mel Gibson traffic stop? Only the Spice Man. Only the Spice Man.

You know what’s crazy? Every day on The Daily Show, we do these jokes all the time: “the administration lies, Trump flip flops.” It doesn’t matter. His supporters still trust him. It has not stopped his momentum at all. It’s almost as if The Daily Show should be on CSPAN. It has left zero impact.

It’s true! And I realized something — maybe it’s because we’re living in this strange time where trust is more important than truth. And supporters of President Trump trust him. And I know journalists, you guys are definitely trying to do good work. I just think that a lot of people don’t trust you right now. And can you blame them? I mean, unlike Anderson Cooper’s bone structure, you guys have been far from perfect. Remember Election Night? That was your Steve Harvey Miss Universe moment. The look on your faces at 11 p.m. on Election Night, it was like walking into a Panera Bread and finding out your sixth grade teacher has a part time job in there. I was like, “what? Mr. Leddington? I guess you don’t have all the answers!”

Because it was all fun and games with Obama, right? You were covering an adult who could speak English. And now you’re covering President Trump, so you have to take your game to a whole new level. It’s like if a bunch of stripper cops had to solve a real-life murder.

Fox News is here. I’m amazed you guys even showed up. How are you here in public? It’s hard to trust you guys when you backed a man like Bill O’Reilly for years. But it finally happened: Bill O’Reilly has been fired. But then you gave him a $25 million severance package, making it the only package he won’t force a woman to touch.
Now, in O’Reilly’s defense, he was told by a close friend, when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

You guys are having a hard time with Jesse Waters right now, too. He’s “on a break right now,” right. He’s “on a break.” Just like my childhood dog is “staying at a farm upstate.” I get it. I know that move.

Now I know some of you are wondering, Hasan, how do you know so much about Fox News? Well, as a Muslim, I like to watch Fox News for the same reason I like to play Call of Duty. Sometimes, I like to turn my brain off and watch strangers insult my family and heritage.

MSNBC is here tonight. And I’m glad you guys are here tonight. That way if I’m bombing, Brian Williams will describe it as stunning. MSNBC, it’s hard to trust you guys when you send us so many mixed messages. On one hand, you tell us the prison industrial complex is the problem, and then you air five straight hours of Lockup. You can’t be mad at corporations profiting off of minorities and prison when you’re a corporation profiting off of minorities and prison.

I have one quick request: MSNBC, please tell Rachel Maddow to chill about Trump’s tax returns. I don’t know what you think you’ll find in there, but there isn’t going to be a line item that just says “bribes from Russia.” That’s not how it works. You’re like “oh, I found the 1040 U.S.S.R.!” It doesn’t work like that.

You’re the liberal news outlet! We dress the same; I look like a melanin version of Chris Hayes. I want to root for you guys, but you’re turning into conspiracy theorists every night. You’re like, “the Russians hacked our elections! The Russians hacked our elections!” Meanwhile, everybody in Latin America and the Middle East is like, “ohhh, a foreign government tampered with your elections? What is that like? Do tell, MSNBC!”

Just pump the breaks! We’re only on Day 100. By the end of the year, you’re all going to have tinfoil hats and jars of urine all over your desks.

Now, I had a lot more MSNBC jokes. But I don’t want to just ramble on; otherwise I might just get a show on MSNBC.

Last but not least, my favorite entertainment channel is in the building tonight. CNN is here, baby. Now! You guys got some really weird trust issues going on with the public. I’m not going to call you “fake news,” but everything isn’t breaking news. You can’t go to DEFCON 1 just because Sanjay Gupta found a new moisturizer. Every time a story breaks, you guys go to nine screens. Nine boxes on the screen — I’m trying to watch the news, not pick a player in Street Fighter. It’s giving me anxiety! If you have nine experts on a panel, what is your barrier of entry? “Here to talk about transportation infrastructure is my Uber driver, Gary. Gary, whaddaya got?” It just says Gary, 4.8 stars. He’s like, “I don’t know, I got a mint?” “Thanks, Gary. Let’s go to the count down clock to the next count down clock.”

All you guys do is stoke up conflict. Don, every time I watch your show it feels like I’m watching a reality TV show. CNN Tonight should just be called, Wait a Second! Now Hold On! Stop Yelling at Each Other, with Don Lemon.

You know you’re news, right? Come on! But every time I watch CNN, it feels like you’re assigning me homework. “Is Trump a Russian spy? I don’t know, you tell me! Tweet us @AC360.” No, you tell me! I’m watching the news!

But it feels like I’m watching CNN watch the news. Please, just take an hour. Figure out what you want to say, then go on the air. But whenever I turn you guys on, it feels like a little kid just ran in the room and is trying to tell you a story. You’re just like, “There’s a wall! $1.4 billion! Paul Ryan?!” Breathe! Take a minute! Drink some milk! Then tell us the story, Wolf.

I know I’m busting balls. I don’t have a solution on how to win back trust. I don’t. But in the age of Trump, I know that you guys have to be more perfect now more than ever, because you are how the president gets his news. Not from advisors, not from experts, not from intelligence agencies — you guys. So that’s why you gotta be on your A game. You gotta be twice as good. You can’t make any mistakes. Because when one of you messes up, he blames your entire group. And now you know what it feels like to be a minority.

And I can see some of you guys complaining — like, what? I gotta work twice as hard for half the credit? Remember: you’re a minority. You guys got a lot more experience than me, but I got three decades of being brown. So if you want to survive the age of Trump, you gotta think like a minority. And now that you’re a minority, oh, man. Everyone is going to expect you to be the mouthpiece for the entire group. So I hate to say it, but somewhere right now, all of you are being represented by Geraldo Rivera.

See, now that you’re truly a minority, there’s a distorted version of you out there. You know, Taco Bell for Mexican culture. Panda Express for Chinese culture. Huffington Post for journalism.

And then, when you actually manage to do great work, you get hit with the most condescending line in the English language: “Hey, you’re actually one of the good ones.” Then you have to smile and say “thank you.” Kind of sucks, doesn’t it? By the way — you guys aren’t really minorities.You guys are super white. But I can see MSNBC being like, “we got our minority card!” No

But your work is invaluable, and I mean that as a fake journalist. I am rooting for you. We’re 100 days in, 1,360 days to go. You guys are running the marathon, and I’m at the half-mile mark giving you tape for your nipples. So I’m wishing you nothing but the best. You chafed, man? You a little chafed? It’s a long way to go.

This has been one of the strangest events I have ever done in my life, to be honest with you. Like, I feel like I’m a tribute in the Hunger Games. If this goes poorly, Steve Bannon gets to eat me.

But I was asked to not roast the president and the administration in their absentia. And I completely understand that. We are in a very strange situation where there’s a very combative relationship between the press and the president. But now that you guys are minorities, just for this moment, you might understand the position I was in. And it’s the same position a lot of minority kids feel in this country. You know — do I come up here and just try to fit in, and not ruffle any feathers? Or do I say how I really feel?
Because this event is about celebrating the First Amendment and free speech. Free speech is the foundation of an open and liberal democracy. From college campuses to the White House, only in America can a first-generation, Indian-American Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the president. The orange man behind the Muslim ban.

And it’s a sign to the rest of the world. It’s this amazing tradition that shows the entire world that even the president is not beyond the reach of the First Amendment.
But the president didn’t show up. Because Donald Trump doesn’t care about free speech. The man who tweets everything that enters his head refuses to acknowledge the amendment that allows him to do it. Think about it, it’s almost — what is it, 11? It’s 11 p.m. right now. In four hours, Donald Trump will be tweeting about how bad Nicki Minaj bombed at this dinner, and he’ll be doing it completely sober. And that’s his right. And I’m proud that all of us are here tonight to defend that right, even if the man in the White House never would.

So I would like to thank the White House Correspondents Association for having me here. I want to thank all of you. I want to thank Woodward and Bernstein for inspiring a generation of journalists. And I would like to thank Donald Trump for inspiring the next. Thank you so much — it’s been an honor.

Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions?

Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/newtown-drones-children-deaths?CMP=twt_gu

Glenn Greenwald     19 December 2012

Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions?

Numerous commentators have rightly lamented the difference in how these childrens' deaths are perceived. What explains it?

(Tariq Aziz (centre, second row) attending a meeting about drones strikes in Waziristan, held in Islamabad, Pakistan oin 28 October 2011. Three days later, the 16 year old was reported killed by a drone-launched missile. Photograph: Pratap Chatterjee/BIJ)

Over the last several days, numerous commentators have lamented the vastly different reactions in the US to the heinous shooting of children in Newtown, Connecticut as compared to the continuous killing of (far more) children and innocent adults by the US government in Pakistan andYemen, among other places. The blogger Atrios this week succinctly observed:

"I do wish more people who manage to fully comprehend the broad trauma a mass shooting can have on our country would consider the consequences of a decade of war."

My Guardian colleague George Monbiot has a powerful and eloquent column this week provocatively entitled: "In the US, mass child killings are tragedies. In Pakistan, mere bug splats". He points out all the ways that Obama has made lethal US attacks in these predominantly Muslim countries not only more frequent but also more indiscriminate - "signature strikes" and "double-tap" attacks on rescuers and funerals - and then argues:

"Most of the world's media, which has rightly commemorated the children of Newtown, either ignores Obama's murders or accepts the official version that all those killed are 'militants'. The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and flowers and teddy bears. They belong to the other: to the non-human world of bugs and grass and tissue.

"'Are we,' Obama asked on Sunday, 'prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?' It's a valid question. He should apply it to the violence he is visiting on the children of Pakistan."

Political philosophy professor Falguni Sheth similarly writes that "the shooting in Newtown, CT is but part and parcel of a culture of shooting children, shooting civilians, shooting innocent adults, that has been waged by the US government since September 12, 2001." She adds:

"And let there be no mistake: many of 'us' have directly felt the impact of that culture: Which 'us'? Yemeni parents, Pakistani uncles and aunts, Afghan grandparents and cousins, Somali brothers and sisters, Filipino cousins have experienced the impact of the culture of killing children. Families of children who live in countries that are routinely droned by the US [government]. Families of children whose villages are raided nightly in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Meanwhile, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, at the peak of mourning over Newtown, simply urged: "Let's also Remember the 178 children Killed by US Drones". He detailed the various ways that children and other innocents have had their lives extinguished by President Obama's policies, and then posted this powerful (and warning: graphic) one-and-a-half-minute video from a new documentary on drones by filmmaker Robert Greenwald (no relation):

.

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Finally, the Yemeni blogger Noon Arabia posted a moving plea on Monday: "Our children's blood is not cheaper than American blood and the pain of loosing [sic] them is just as devastating. Our children matter too, Mr. President! These tragedies 'also' must end and to end them 'YOU' must change!"

There's just no denying that many of the same people understandably expressing such grief and horror over the children who were killed in Newtown steadfastly overlook, if not outright support, the equally violent killing of Yemeni and Pakistani children. Consider this irony: Monday was the three-year anniversary of President Obama's cruise missile and cluster-bomb attack on al-Majala in Southern Yemen that ended the lives of 14 women and 21 children: one more child than was killed by the Newtown gunman. In the US, that mass slaughter received not even a small fraction of the attention commanded by Newtown, and prompted almost no objections (in predominantly Muslim nations, by contrast, it received ample attention and anger).

It is well worth asking what accounts for this radically different reaction to the killing of children and other innocents. Relatedly, why is the US media so devoted to covering in depth every last detail of the children killed in the Newtown attack, but so indifferent to the children killed by its own government?

To ask this question is not - repeat: is not - to equate the Newtown attack with US government attacks. There are, one should grant, obvious and important differences.

To begin with, it is a natural and probably universal human inclination to care more about violence that seems to threaten us personally than violence that does not. Every American parent sends their children to schools of the type attacked in Newtown and empathy with the victims is thus automatic. Few American parents fear having their children attacked by US drones, cruise missiles and cluster bombs in remote regions in Pakistan and Yemen, and empathy with those victims is thus easier to avoid, more difficult to establish.

One should strive to see the world and prioritize injustices free of pure self-interest - caring about grave abuses that are unlikely to affect us personally is a hallmark of a civilized person - but we are all constructed to regard imminent dangers to ourselves and our loved ones with greater urgency than those that appear more remote. Ignoble though it is, that's just part of being human - though our capacity to liberate ourselves from pure self-interest means that it does not excuse this indifference.

Then there's the issue of perceived justification. Nobody can offer, let alone embrace, any rationale for the Newtown assault: it was random, indiscriminate, senseless and deliberate slaughter of innocents. Those who support Obama's continuous attacks, or flamboyantly display their tortured "ambivalence" as a means of avoiding criticizing him, can at least invoke a Cheneyite slogan along with a McVeigh-taught-military-term to pretend that there's some purpose to these killings: We Have To Kill The Terrorists, and these dead kids are just Collateral Damage. This rationale is deeply dishonest, ignorant, jingoistic, propagandistic, and sociopathic, but its existence means one cannot equate it to the Newtown killing.

But there are nonetheless two key issues highlighted by the intense grief for the Newtown victims compared to the utter indifference to the victims of Obama's militarism. The first is that it underscores how potent and effective the last decade's anti-Muslim dehumanization campaign has been.

Every war - particularly protracted ones like the "War on Terror" - demands sustained dehumanization campaigns against the targets of the violence.  Few populations will tolerate continuous killings if they have to confront the humanity of those who are being killed. The humanity of the victims must be hidden and denied. That's the only way this constant extinguishing of life by their government can be justified or at least ignored. That was the key point made in the extraordinarily brave speech given by then-MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield in 2003 after she returned from Iraq, before she was demoted and then fired: that US media coverage of US violence is designed to conceal the identity and fate of its victims.

The violence and rights abridgments of the Bush and Obama administrations have been applied almost exclusively to Muslims. It is, therefore, Muslims who have been systematically dehumanized. Americans virtually never hear about the Muslims killed by their government's violence. They're never profiled. The New York Times doesn't put powerful graphics showing their names and ages on its front page. Their funerals are never covered. President Obama never delivers teary sermons about how these Muslim children "had their entire lives ahead of them - birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own." That's what dehumanization is: their humanity is disappeared so that we don't have to face it.

But this dehumanization is about more than simply hiding and thus denying the personhood of Muslim victims of US violence. It is worse than that: it is based on the implicit, and sometimes overtly stated, premise that Muslims generally, even those guilty of nothing, deserve what the US does to them, or are at least presumed to carry blame.

Just a few months ago, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration has re-defined the term "militant" to mean: "all military-age males in a strike zone" - the ultimate expression of the rancid dehumanizing view that Muslims are inherently guilty of being Terrorists unless proven otherwise. When Obama's campaign surrogate and former Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the US killing by drone strike of 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki two weeks after his father was killed, Gibbs unleashed one of the most repulsive statements heard in some time: that Abdulrahman should have "had a more responsible father". Even when innocent Muslim teenagers are killed by US violence, it is their fault, and not the fault of the US and its leaders.

All of this has led to rhetoric and behavior that is nothing short of deranged when it comes to discussing the Muslim children and other innocents killed by US violence.  I literally have never witnessed mockery over dead children like that which is spewed from some of Obama's hard-core progressive supporters whenever I mention the child-victims of Obama's drone attacks.  Jokes like that are automatic. In this case at least, the fish rots from the head: recall President Obama's jovial jokes at a glamorous media dinner about his use of drones to kill teeangers (sanctioned by the very same political faction that found Bush's jokes about his militarism - delivered at the same media banquet several years earlier - so offensive). Just as is true of Gibbs' deranged and callous rationale, jokes like that are possible only when you have denied the humanity of those who are killed. Would Newtown jokes be tolerated by anyone?

Dehumanization of Muslims is often overt, by necessity, in US military culture. The Guardian headline to Monbiot's column refers to the term which Rolling Stones' Michael Hastings reported is used for drone victims: "bug splat". And consider this passage from an amazing story this week in Der Spiegel (but not, notably, in US media) on a US drone pilot, Brandon Bryant, who had to quit because he could no longer cope with the huge amount of civilian deaths he was witnessing and helping to cause:

"Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world. . . .

"[H]e remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact. . . .

"With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

"Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

"Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

"'Did we just kill a kid?' he asked the man sitting next to him.

"'Yeah, I guess that was a kid,' the pilot replied.

"'Was that a kid?' they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

"Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. 'No. That was a dog,' the person wrote.

"They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?"

Seeing Muslim children literally as dogs: few images more perfectly express the sustained dehumanization at the heart of US militarism and aggression over the last decade.

Citizens of a militaristic empire are inexorably trained to adopt the mentality of their armies: just listen to Good Progressive Obama defenders swagger around like they're decorated, cigar-chomping combat veterans spouting phrases like "war is hell" and "collateral damage" to justify all of this. That is the anti-Muslim dehumanization campaign rearing its toxic head.

There's one other issue highlighted by this disparate reaction: the question of agency and culpability. It's easy to express rage over the Newtown shooting because so few of us bear any responsibility for it and - although we can take steps to minimize the impact and make similar attacks less likely - there is ultimately little we can do to stop psychotic individuals from snapping.  Fury is easy because it's easy to tell ourselves that the perpetrator - the shooter - has so little to do with us and our actions.

Exactly the opposite is true for the violence that continuously kills children and other innocent people in the Muslim world.  Many of us empowered and cheer for the person responsible for that.  US citizens pay for it, enable it, and now under Obama, most at the very least acquiesce to it if not support it.  It's always much more difficult to acknowledge the deaths that we play a role in causing than it is to protest those to which we believe we have no connection. That, too, is a vital factor explaining these differing reactions.

Please spare me the objection that the Newtown shooting should not be used to make a point about the ongoing killing of Muslim children and other innocents by the US.  Over the last week, long-time gun control advocates have seized on this school shooting in an attempt to generate support for their political agenda, and they're perfectly right to do so: when an event commands widespread political attention and engages human emotion, that is exactly when one should attempt to persuade one's fellow citizens to recognize injustices they typically ignore. That is no more true for gun control than it is the piles of corpses the Obama administration continues to pile up for no good reason - leaving in their wake, all over the Muslim world, one Newtown-like grieving ritual after the next.

As Monbiot observed: "there can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people" in Newtown.  The exact opposite is true for the children and their families continuously killed in the Muslim world by the US government: huge numbers of people, particularly in the countries responsible, remain completely untouched by the grief that is caused in those places. That is by design - to ensure that opposition is muted - and it is brutally effective.

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Truth's Consequences
by digby    Friday, April 27, 2007
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com.br/2007/04/truths-consequences-by-digby-since.html

Since the Moyers show, I have been thinking of many things that happened during that intense period in 2002 and 2003 when the political and media establishment seemed to lose its collective mind (again) and took this country into an inexplicable and unnecessary war. As tristero notes below, the story is long and complicated and it will take years to put it all together, if it ever happens.

I was reminded of one episode, after the invasion, that came as big surprise to me because it came from an unexpected source. And it was one of those stories that was clearly a cautionary tale for any up and coming members of the media who valued their jobs.

On 9/11 those of us who were lucky enough not to be in Manhattan sat glued to our television sets and watched a star being born. Here's how the Wikipedia described it:

On September 11, 2001, Ashleigh Banfield was reporting from the streets of Manhattan, where she was nearly suffocated from the debris cloud from the collapsing World Trade Center. Banfield continued reporting, even as she rescued a NYPD officer, and with him, fled to safety into a streetside shop. After the initial reporting of the tragedy had ended, Banfield received a promotion, as MSNBC sent her around the world as the producer of a new program, A Region in Conflict.

A Region in Conflict was broadcast mainly from Pakistan and Afghanistan, generally considered locations unfriendly to Westerners. To report day-to-day local stories in that area of the world, she sometimes used her Canadian citizenship to provide access where Americans might not be welcome. She would read viewer e-mails on-air, sometimes without reviewing them beforehand, to avoid bias.

During the conflict in Afghanistan, Banfield interviewed Taliban prisoners, and visited a hospital in Kabul. Later entries covered her travels from Jalalabad to Kabul, as well as other experiences in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, she interviewed Father Gregory Rice, a Catholic priest in Pakistan, and an Iraqi woman aiding refugees. While in Afghanistan, Banfield darkened her blonde hair in order to be less obviously a foreigner.

I made terrible fun of Banfield. She seemed to me to be the personification of the infotainment industrial complex, a reporter better known for her stylish spectacles and blond highlights than her journalistic skills. She was their girl hero, a Jessica Lynch of TV news, constructed out of whole cloth in the marketing department of MSNBC. But I was wrong about her. It's true that she was a cable news star who was created out of the rubble of 9/11, but her reporting that day really was pretty riveting. Her stories from Afghanistan were often shallow, but no more than any of the other blow dried hunks they dispatched over there, and they were sometimes better. Still, she symbolized for me the media exploitation of 9/11 and the War on Terror Show and I was unforgiving.

But very shortly after the invasion of Iraq --- even before Codpiece Day --- Banfield delivered a speech that destroyed her career. She was instantly demoted by MSNBC and fired less than a year later.

Do you remember what she said?

Ashleigh Banfield Landon Lecture

Kansas State University

Manhattan, Kansas

April 24, 2003

...I suppose you watch enough television to know that the big TV show is over and that the war is now over essentially -- the major combat operations are over anyway, according to the Pentagon and defense officials -- but there is so much that is left behind. And I'm not just talking about the most important thing, which is, of course, the leadership of a Middle Eastern country that could possibly become an enormous foothold for American and foreign interests. But also what Americans find themselves deciding upon when it comes to news, and when it comes to coverage, and when it comes to war, and when it comes to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate any longer.

I think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process, which I'll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that we've never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we'd never seen before and were witness to for the first time.

And there are all sorts of good things that come from that, and there are all sorts of terrible things that come from that. The good things are the obvious. This is one more perspective that we all got when it comes to warfare, how it's fought and how tough these soldiers are, what the conditions are like and what it really looks like when they're firing those M-16s rapidly across a river, or across a bridge, or into a building.

[...]

So for that element alone it was a wonderful new arm of access that journalists got to warfare. Perhaps not that new, because we all knew what it looked like at Vietnam and what a disaster that was for the government, but this did put us in a very, very close line of sight to the unfolding disasters.

That said, what didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid of horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.

I can't tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you've got to be on both sides. You've got to be a unilateral, someone who's able to cover from outside of both front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled, they were everything. But we really don't know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.

That just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. This was a success, it was a charge it took only three weeks. We did wonderful things and we freed the Iraqi people, many of them by the way, who are quite thankless about this. There's got to be a reason for that. And the reason for it is because we don't have a very good image right now overseas, and a lot of Americans aren't quite sure why, given the fact that we sacrificed over a hundred soldiers to give them freedom.

[...]

All they know is that we're crusaders. All they know is that we're imperialists. All they know is that we want their oil. They don't know otherwise. And I'll tell you, a lot of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan had never heard of the Twin Towers and most of them couldn't recognize a picture of George Bush.

[...]

That will be a very interesting story to follow in the coming weeks and months, as to how this vacuum is filled and how we go about presenting a democracy to these people when -- if we give them democracy they probably will ask us to get out, which is exactly what many of them want.

[...]

As a journalist I'm often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, "Here's what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here's what the Lebanese are telling me and here's what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here's what they have to say about the Golan Heights." Like it or lump it, don't shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.

We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al -Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they're prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that's not all, as a porn star. And that's not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

How can you discuss, how can you solve anything when attacks from a mere radio flak is what America hears on a regular basis, let alone at the government level? I mean, if this kind of attitude is prevailing, forget discussion, forget diplomacy, diplomacy is becoming a bad word.

[..]

When I said the war was over I kind of mean that in the sense that cards are being pulled from this famous deck now of the 55 most wanted, and they're sort of falling out of the deck as quickly as the numbers are falling off the rating chart for the cable news stations. We have plummeted into the basement in the last week. We went from millions of viewers to just a few hundred thousand in the course of a couple of days.

Did our broadcasting change? Did we get boring? Did we all a sudden lose our flair? Did we start using language that people didn't want to hear? No, I think you've just had enough. I think you've seen the story, you've' seen how it ended, it ended pretty well in most American's view; it's time to move on.

What's the next big story? Is it Laci Peterson? Because Laci Peterson got a whole lot more minutes' worth of coverage on the cable news channels in the last week than we'd have ever expected just a few days after a regime fell, like Saddam Hussein.

I don't want to suggest for a minute that we are shallow people, we Americans. At times we are, but I do think that the phenomenon of our attention deficit disorder when it comes to watching television news and watching stories and then just being finished with them, I think it might come from the saturation that you have nowadays. You cannot walk by an airport monitor, you can't walk by most televisions in offices these days, in the public, without it being on a cable news channel. And if you're not in front of a TV you're probably in front of your monitor, where there is Internet news available as well.

You have had more minutes of news on the Iraq war in just the three-week campaign than you likely ever got in the years and years of network news coverage of Vietnam. You were forced to wait for it till six o'clock every night and the likelihood that you got more than about eight minutes of coverage in that half hour show, you probably didn't get a whole lot more than that, and it was about two weeks old, some of that footage, having been shipped back. Now it's real time and it is blanketed to the extent that we could see this one arm of the advance, but not where the bullets landed.

But I think the saturation point is reached faster because you just get so much so fast, so absolutely in real time that it is time to move on. And that makes our job very difficult, because we tend to leave behind these vacuums that are left uncovered. When was the last time you saw a story about Afghanistan? It's only been a year, you know. Only since the major combat ended, you were still in Operation Anaconda in not much more than 11 or 12 months ago, and here we are not touching Afghanistan at all on cable news.

There was just a memorandum that came through saying we're closing the Kabul bureau. The Kabul bureau has only been staffed by one person for the last several months, Maria Fasal, she's Afghan and she wanted to be there, otherwise I don't think anyone would have taken that assignment. There's just been no allotment of TV minutes for Afghanistan.

And I am very concerned that the same thing is about to happen with Iraq, because we're going to have another Gary Condit, and we're going to have another Chandra Levy and we're going to have another Jon Benet, and we're going to have another Elizabeth Smart, and here we are in Laci Peterson, and these stories will dominate. They're easy to cover, they're cheap, they're fast, you don't have to send somebody overseas, you don't have to put them up in a hotel that's expensive overseas, and you don't have to set up satellite time overseas. Very cheap to cover domestic news. Domestic news is music news to directors' ears.

But is that what you need to know? Don't you need to know what our personality is overseas and what the ramifications of these campaigns are? Because we went to Iraq, according to the President, to make sure that we were going to be safe from weapons of mass destruction, that no one would attack us. Well, did everything all of a sudden change? The terror alert went down. All of a sudden everything seems to be better, but I can tell you from living over there, it's not.

[...]

There was a reporter in the New York Times a couple days ago at the Pentagon. It was a report on the ground in Iraq that the Americans were going to have four bases that they would continue to use possibly on a permanent basis inside Iraq, kind of in a star formation, the north, the south, Baghdad and out west. Nobody was able to actually say what these bases would be used for, whether it was forward operations, whether it was simple access, but it did speak volumes to the Arab world who said, "You see, we told you the Americans were coming for their imperialistic need. They needed a foothold, they needed to control something in central and west Asia to make sure that we all next door come into line."

And these reports about Syria, well, they may have been breezed over fairly quickly here, but they are ringing loud still over there. Syria's next. And then Lebanon. And look out lran.

So whether we think it's plausible or whether the government even has any designs like that, the Arabs all think it's happening and they think it's for religious purposes for the most part.

[...]

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I'm very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people's opinions. It was very sanitized.

It had a very brief respite from the sanitation when Terry Lloyd was killed, the ITN, and when David Bloom was killed and when Michael Kelley was killed. We all sort of sat back for a moment and realized, "God, this is ugly. This is hitting us at home now. This is hitting the noncombatants." But that went away quickly too.

This TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there's nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

War is ugly and it's dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It's a dangerous thing to propagate.

[...]

There is another whole phenomenon that's come about from this war. Many talk about it as the Fox effect, the Fox news effect. I know everyone of you has watched it. It's not a dirty little secret. A lot of people describe Fox as having streamers and banners coming out of the television as you're watching it cover a war. But the Fox effect is very concerning to me.

I'm a journalist and I like to be able to tell the story as I see it, and I hate it when someone tells me I'm one-sided. It's the worst I can hear. Fox has taken so many viewers away from CNN and MSNBC because of their agenda and because of their targeting the market of cable news viewership, that I'm afraid there's not a really big place in cable for news. Cable is for entertainment, as it's turning out, but not news.

I'm hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.

Well, all of this has to do with what you've seen on Fox and its successes. So I do urge you to be very discerning as you continue to watch the development of cable news, and it is changing like lightning. Be very discerning because it behooves you like it never did before to watch with a grain of salt and to choose responsibly, and to demand what you should know.

That's it. I know that there's probably a couple questions. No one's allowed to ask about my hair color, okay? I'm kidding, if you want to ask you can. It's a pretty boring story. But I just wanted to say thank you, and let's all pray and hope in any way that you pray or hope for peace and for democracy around the world, and for more rain this summer in Manhattan. Thank you all.

She may have been hoping for a future in able news, but you can't help but feel she knew she wouldn't after delivering those remarks. (Read the whole thing at the link if you're interested in a further scathing critique of the government.)

Perhaps someone with more stature than Banfield could have gotten away with that speech and maybe it might have even been taken seriously, who knows? But the object lesson could not have been missed by any of the ambitious up and comers in the news business. If a TV journalist publicly spoke the truth anywhere about war, the news, even their competitors --- and Banfield spoke the truth in that speech --- their career was dead in the water. Even the girl hero of 9/11 (maybe especially the girl hero of 9/11) could not get away with breaking the CW code of omerta and she had to pay.

She's now a co-anchor on a Court TV show.

김어준 아주대 강연

.
(아이는 키우기 보다는 알아서 큰다.)
그의 부모님, 한번도 하지 말라고 한 적도 없지만, 그렇다고 김어준의 행동에 대해 대신 책임을 져준 적도 없다.
손으로 밥을 먹다. 인간, 그저 하나의 동물일 뿐.
자신감과 자존감에 대한 그의 정의

U.S. journalist v. Korean journalist and naggomsu (나꼼수)

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-12-12/millionaires-taxes-and-jobs/transcript

The Diane Rehm Show, Millionaires, Taxes And Jobs, 2011.12.12

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whether journalists in Korea like naggomsu (나꼼수) or not, it should be alarming to them. Naggomsu is telling them, “Hey, guys, get off your ass, and go meet with people who might know about something you are interested in covering, as opposed to conveying press release verbatim or accusing naggomsu of being full of baseless charges.

In this sense, I appreciate her (Keith) giving a shot in the dark. I also need that spirit.

=============

KEITH

Yes. So I did this story that aired Friday on "Morning Edition" that got right at this question of what do the job creators think and who are these job creators who bring in more than $1 million a year. The argument from Republicans and others is that many small businesses are set up as corps or other types of corporations, where the profits from the business pass through to the individual and show up on their individual taxes.

So, in theory, someone who is not excessively wealthy but who has a very successful small business could have $1 million show up on their annual taxes as income, and, thus, they would be taxed on that. So I went to the Republicans in Congress who have been making this argument most strenuously, and I said, please put me in touch with some of the people who would be affected.

And this is a pretty standard thing. You'd go to members of Congress or you'd go to interest groups and you say,  you're making this point, Give me the human interest story. I want to talk to these people.

Well, it turns out they couldn't produce anyone. I called very early last week and said, please help me. The members of Congress directed me to a group called the Tax Relief Coalition, also the NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Chamber of Commerce. So I went to these groups early in the week and I said, please help me find someone to talk to. And they couldn't find anyone. All week long they couldn't find anyone.

For a small business owner or a business owner earning more than $1 million a year, who would be reporting more than $1 million a year of income on their taxes, basically someone who would be affected by this millionaire's surtax. And they could not produce anyone. At one point, the Tax Relief Coalition vice president told me, well, you know, people just don't want to talk about their very personal taxes on national radio.

So I went to the NPR Facebook page and put out a request and said, are there any millionaires out there who would be willing to talk to me? It was just kind of a shot in the dark. And I got about 30 responses, which is remarkable. However, basically everyone who responded said that the surtax would not affect hiring because what affects hiring is their business conditions, whether they have enough business to need another employee.

================

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-12-16/friday-news-roundup-international/transcript

The Diane Rehm Show  Friday News Roundup – International  2011.12.16

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The courage of Diane Rehm to raise up an “unpleasant question” to her colleague would make her a valuable asset in the US media, and, particularly, contribute to building public confidence in NPR.  

On the other hand, the controversy over illegality of the Iraq war in 2003 was not hard to cover, given the struggle the US had with other UN Security Council members. Even assuming WMD existed in Iraq, the US was not authorized to use force, as the US agreed to subject herself to UN regime.  

=========

REHM

David, I'm going to ask you an unpleasant question. Do you think that journalists were complicit in promoting the idea that war in Iraq was inevitable?

IGNATIUS

Let me speak about my own work rather than talk about the profession as a whole. As I look back, there are no columns I've ever written that I'd more like to revise in light of what I know now than the ones I wrote then. I do think that our profession was so convinced that Bush was going to go to war that we spent a lot of time getting ready to cover it and relatively less time writing about whether it made sense, looking to see what the dissent there was in the military and the State Department.

I think we just figured it was going to happen and so we were queuing up for the best embed assignments, the best opportunities to cover it. And I think everybody in our profession looks back and, I hope, learned lessons from that, to ask more questions, just to insist on getting the evidence for things that are so consequential for the country.

Nadia BILBASSY

I was actually embedded as well with the Marines during the beginning of the war and I remember being in Kuwait and President Bush was giving this ultimatum to Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave the country within 24 hours, otherwise he cannot avoid the war. And I was sitting there and thinking how on earth can you avoid the war? You have almost 150,000 troops already deployed.

The drums of war were already, you know, hitting everywhere so, to me, it was already the decision has been made, whether it was given a last minute choice for Saddam to leave...

REHM

Isn't it the responsibility, and I think David put it well, to question those decisions rather than simply covering the operation itself and the decision to move forward? I, for one, feel very disappointed in our profession that we did not ask the questions that should have been asked.

Robin Harding

So I can speak a bit from my own paper in that I think we did, by and large at the time, question these things. Our editorial line was, by and large, certainly very questioning with the Iraq war and speaking also a little bit for the British media. I remember how much it was seen through a domestic, political lens. It was seen through the lens of, do you want to be seen opposing this or do you want to be seen as lining up behind the U.S.? So there was a sort of a confidence of interests which did come before the asking of questions and the responsibility of journalists is to do it the other way around.