The Gadfly was amusing himself with the idiot box last evening and while channel surfing between re-runs of 'SpongeBob Squarepants' and the umpteenth seasonal replaying of 'Home Alone 2 : Lost in New York', The Gadfly paused briefly on one of those so-called "news" outlets only to hear breathless accounts about some kind of earth-shattering event which apparently took place earlier in the day, and it was of such dire import that it appears to have plunged America in to a nation-wide crisis situation not heretofore seen since the day King George III's redcoats were forming battle lines at Lexington and Concord.
After investigating a bit more thoroughly on the intertoobs, The Gadfly found out what all of the media pants-shitting consternation was all about -- it was this:
That is a photo of President Obama passing through a lineup of world leaders at South Africa's Nelson Mandela memorial yesterday, and politely shaking the hand of Cuban de facto leader Raul Castro, for which every other leader of democracies present at the event, performed with the same perfunctory obligation.
And 1..2..3 . . . cue the American mainstream media hacks, egged on by the right wing media hacks, to sprint to their fainting couches and feign acute cases of the aggrieved vapors.
Which perplexed The Gadfly because the world didn't seem to give much of a shit when these equally diplomatic protocol events occurred in the past:
President Richard Nixon pressing the flesh of Chairman Mao -- a man whom Wikipedia describes as:
"historians, have labeled him a dictator whose administration oversaw systematic human rights abuses, and whose rule is estimated to have caused the deaths of 40–70 million people through starvation, forced labor and executions, ranking his tenure as the top incidence of democide in human history."
Or this,
Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, representing the Ronald Reagan administration, pressing the flesh while making secret chemical weapons and arms deals with the butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein. Wikipedia recounts what a great guy ol' Saddam was -- of course until we decided he wasn't:
In 1988, the Hussein regime began a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq. This is known as the Anfal campaign. The campaign was mostly directed at Shiite Kurds (Faili Kurds) who sided with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran War. The attacks resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 182,000) people, many of them women and children. A team of Human Rights Watch investigators determined, after analyzing eighteen tons of captured Iraqi documents, testing soil samples and carrying out interviews with more than 350 witnesses, that the attacks on the Kurdish people were characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants, widespread use of chemical weapons including Sarin, mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands, the arbitrary imprisoning of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months in conditions of extreme deprivation, forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers after the demolition of their homes, and the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms and power stations.
Or this,
President George W. Bush holding hands with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, whom historian David Wallechinsky labels as one of the "world's worst dictators" and describes curtly:
Under King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia adheres to a punitive justice system in which young teens can be sentenced to death and defendants tortured. Women are more oppressed than in any other country—they can’t even seek medical care without a male guardian’s permission.
And no -- those are not doctored photos, nor manufactured factoids.
So if the media and the right wing infants want to play games and pretend that the Obama/Castro handshake was anything more than what it actually was, that's their prerogative, but don't ask The Gadfly to sit back and pretend that it is anything but just another cynical attempt to deny this black President the same kind of foreign policy deference that was accorded previous Republican and Democratic presidents.
And all the more reason dear readers as to why The Gadfly refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy, much less the integrity, of the corporate mainstream media and the muck-raking hacks who permeate it's ranks.
----TFG
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