enabling the passive voice:
As if he hadn’t done enough damage already, helping to promote the American invasion of Iraq with deeply flawed articles in The New York Times, Michael R. Gordon is now writing scare stories that offer ammunition for the growing chorus of neo-cons calling for a U.S. strike against Iran - his most recent effort appearing just this morning.Mitchell/Editor&Publisher 03.Jul.07
What’s most lamentable is that editors at The New York Times, who should have learned their lessons four years ago, are once again serving as enablers.
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What seems to some of us out here, far from whatever daily grind of pressure and response is working on Gordon and the editors of the Times, and Mitchell you'd have to assume to some extent, a more salient point, is who's being enabled there, as Gordon takes his skills as messenger and value-added information packager once more into the breach, and Mitchell critically if incompletely examines the result.
Mitchell doesn't say, as though it's not as key as what he accurately describes as being done by Gordon and the editors of the New York Times and possibly other less public figures, but if he could say why, if he could bring himself to address it, considering why would allow us to anticipate, forecast, and link other people and events to what's being rejected almost unanimously by everyone in America now except its elected officials and its commercial news organizations - that thing that has currently the face of the "war in Iraq" but is clearly something bigger and darker.
Describing the "growing chorus of neocons" that way, as a chorus, something tangential to the main plot, something closer to a protesting mob than a cabal of efficient conscienceless gangsters, leaves out their main attribute at the moment - that they campaigned for, planned for, organized and prosecuted the lead-in to the invasion of Iraq, and did so with an astonishingly small amount of visible players, successfully, having got what they were after - the destruction of Iraq as a military presence and as an economically independent state in the Middle East has been accomplished. So chorus they may be, but it's a louder and more ominous noise they're making than the phrase carries superficially.
These men or the the interest they serve not only developed the idea of invasion and occupation of Iraq into its current awful reality, they've had years of the sock-puppet acquiescence of the Bush Administration and its Congressional enablers to hand-pick the military leadership the already-owned media now quote, through Gordon, as unquestionable primary sources fingering Iran for events and conditions the rest of us have no clear alternative way of interpreting without relying on imagination and suspicion.
The tacit assumptions behind Mitchell's position, the hoped-for assuming that was no doubt one of Gordon's minor goals - incompetent tyrant Bush and shallow arrogant petroleum-worshipping Cheney, like tumors that can be identified and removed by a familiar and safe operation - are solidified and strengthened by being left unnamed.
The more radical version, that Bush and his whole house of cards, and Gordon and the editors of The New York Times and theirs, are part of an architecture of lies that's deep complex and confusing and even the voices we should be able to rely on to cut through that confusion and make clearer what's happening only add to that confusion - Mitchell and all the rest of the chorus of sane and normative opposition that has barked at them all these years and done nothing, not one single effective thing to stop them, the people who were meant to understand themselves as addressed by that chilling pronouncement from the elect, back in 2002:
"...we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."Mitchell's response to, and Gordon's regurgitated fiction itself, the splash and ripple of it across the pond of American public attention, keep the larger questions out of sight and mind.
Who's that "we" whose reality we're studying?
Who's done this to the world?
What do they really want?
And what will it take to stop them.
