Sam, if you haven’t seen oil mentioned in the same breath as Iraq “except by” you, then you haven’t been reading many of the comments by numerous posters at Truthdig as well as many of the erudite pieces at the Nation and Mother Jones which reveal that oil is one of the reasons but not the only reason for the invasion and occupation which entails, as Naomi Klein has so astutely analyzed, and exercise in disaster capitalism and old-fashioned imperialism designed to impose neoliberal privatization at the point of a gun.  If you exclusively focus on the oil, you miss, among other things, how war and chaos directly serve the interests of the military-industrial complex and war profiteers like Halliburton and Blackwater.

My problem with your comments is that they are fraught with overstatement.  While PBS has been under assault by Republicans, you vastly overstate the problem by simply dismissing it as “belly up” when we still have the likes of Bill Moyers on its programs.  By the way, while the Republi-crooks in the House had sought to cut PBS funding during the last Congress, their proposal did not succeed.

Bravo, Studs!  95 years and going strong! You can ignore ideologues like SamSnedegar who always attack anyone who isn’t exactly in lock-step with them and their tunnel vision.

I hope I make it to 95 and that I’m as vibrant and ferocious and honorable as Studs Terkel.

“...there is a fundamental difference between corporate media, PBS and alternative media…”

not quite sure of your point, since I agree with all you say that I can understand, but pbs “goes with the flow,” meaning when the Repubs took over the congress, pbs went belly up to them because that’s where the money comes from for the most part.

but when I refer to media, I mean Mother Jones and the Nation as well as this truthdig blog where you will not see oil mentioned in the same breath as Iraq except by me.

Someone ought to write “It’s the Oil, Stupid,” but as Greenspan said, everyone knows it’s about oil, but none want to admit to our coveting, lying, murdering, and stealing. It is unseemly; not only that, if we discuss the REASON we need to steal oil, then the dollar might just go south where it has belonged for the past 20 years and our depression will begin as did those of Argentina and Enron. Yes, a lot of countries will go down with us when we go, but go we must, and anyone who thinks we can pay off our nine trillion dollar debt and make our government solvent is a bigger fool than . . . . well, say Fred Barnes or Jonah Golddig—-or poor James Inhofe, who may be dumber than Bush.

Anyway, the ENTIRE media has failed us, INCLUDING pbs and supposedly “liberal” news sources. The only place you ever heard about oil on the Air America radio net was from Randi and once when Seder and Janeane had Gore Vidal on their show. I listened to hundreds of hours of Franken along with Conason and Oliphant and many other fine reporters-analysts, and I never one time heard the word oil mentioned.

So what is it to be, our “dirty little secret,” or our failure to deliver the news or both?

The pollsters won’t even ASK people if they think the occupation of Iraq was about oil, let alone show us the result of that question which will indicate that 95% of Americans are either (a) uninformed or (b) bone stupid or (c) big liars.

Scheer got FIRED by big media, and while I cannot possibly know that he didn’t call the CEO of the LATimes a name or cuckold him, I can and do infer that he was fired for telling the truth anent the oil thieving, for indeed he did so, and did so frequently. So did Eric Margolis tell the truth frequently, but today he is as big a liar as any alive, and Chris Floyd also did the same and got fired by almost everyone for his trouble.

And why would Britain join the USA in this folly? Well SOMEONE (not Bush, who couldn’t convince a monkey that bananas are good, even though he looks more like a monkey than a man) made Tony realize that if the USA didn’t steal oil it would perish as an economic entity, and with it would go jolly olde England. And yet the Guardian, who are about as liberal (synonym with truthful?) as can be, never once mentioned oil even as a POSSIBILE reason for the invasion and long-term occupation of Iraq.

So the Guardian is included when I make derisive comments anent “media,” which has failed us miserably from the first day of the administration of the Bushitter gang of thugs.

Your reference, Sam, to “media” is overbroad.  While corporate media acts as a propaganda network, there is a fundamental difference between corporate media, PBS and alternative media.  Take Iraq.  The Univ. of MD conducted a 2003 study of people who held at least one of three misperception—WMD, links to al Qaeda & the belief that world opinion supported the invasion.  80% of Fox News viewers held at least one of these misperceptions; 71% at CBS, 61% at ABC and 55% each at CNN & NBC as compared to only 23% at PBS.  A 2004 study revealed that 75% of those who believed both the WMD & al Qaeda-links canards favored Bush’s re-election.  Much was made of a 2006 LeMoyne College/Zogby poll’s 72, representing the percentage of troops serving in Iraq who favored withdrawal, the telling statistic is 85—the percentage of troops serving in Iraq who believe the US mission was intended “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”  Fox is the only channel broadcast into naval and troop facilities in Iraq.

There is a fundamental distinction between journalism and stenography.  Compare Bill Moyers & Jim Lehrer.  Moyers refuses to be drawn into the “charade of ‘fair and balanced’—by which two opposing people offer competing opinions with a host who assumes the viewer will arrive at the truth by splitting the difference—to substitute for independent analysis…Objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the malfeasance, deceits, hypocrisy, and lies of powerful people.”  Moyers contrasts this to Jim Lehrer’s belief that “unless an official says something is so, it isn’t news.  Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq?  Because, says Lehrer, ‘the word ‘occupation’...was never mentioned in the run-up to the war.’  Washington talked about the invasion as ‘a war of liberation, not a war of occupation.  So as a consequence, those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.’”

The corporate media create what Noam Chomsky describes in “Failed States” as a “democracy deficit”—the “substantial gap between public policy and public opinion.”  Elections are run by the same PR industry that devotes itself to selling products.  “Business spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year projecting imagery to delude consumers….As [Thornstein] Veblen pounted out…one of the primary tasks of propaganda is the ‘fabrication of consumers,’ a device that helps induce ‘all classic symptoms of state-based totalitarianism:  atomization, political apathy and irrationailty, the hollowing and banalization of purportedly democratic political processes….” Ominously, Joseph Goebbels “conscripted the leading commercial advertising men in Germany for his propaganda ministry,” stating that “‘he would use American advertising methods’ to ‘sell National Socialism’”

In packaging candidates, the PR industry “resorts to the same techniques as” it uses in “marketing commodities.  Deceit is employed to undermine democracy….”  In candidate packaging, the public is not presented a detailed analysis of where they stand on the issues of the day but on the projection of image.  This explains the vast gap between ordinary polls and a blind poll conducted last Aug. which listed the Democratic candidate’s actual positions but left off their names.  One candidate, Kucinich, received 58% while the rest were at or near single digits.

Since the DCers are so isolated from real America, they don’t know they actually have the support of most Americans to go after this criminal admin.  The best way to clean up this mess is to vote all incumbents out.  They refuse to impeach these two morons, they need to go…...

Terkel no different from the rest of you beholden to the publishers. Can’t tell the truth because it is inconvenient. The only reason that Greenspan’s ONE SENTENCE got through was poor editing, and of course you heard him scurry like a rat to deny he MEANT exactly what he said, which was NOT that the war was largely about oil, BUT that the fact that the war was largely about oil was being hidden by EVERYONE because they all REFUSED to talk about it——just like you.

Even Gore Vidal has backed off and given in to the publishers . . . Dreyfuss presents the facts as SARCASM these days, and most of you don’t go near them at all.

If you want to know how badly the media has failed, you only have to check and see how many polled Americans think that Saddam was responsible for nine eleven. Most did when we went to war; an unconscionable (for the media) number STILL do.

Maybe it’s better to live a lie than to admit you are a lying, coveting, thieving murderer.

“While he is a man of the 20th century, he continues to write about the 21st century. In fact, he has just sued AT&T;for collaborating with the government in eavesdropping….....

Terkel is a fierce critic of the Bush administration, but also of the lack of historical context in American society, which has allowed this government to persist, to attack Iraq, to plan on attacking Iran…......

Louis (Studs) Terkel, the third son of Russian-Jewish parents, was born in the Bronx on 16th May, 1912…....”

Well there is one Jewish emigre who got it right. That is, reality ahead of fantasy and America ahead of Israel!!!

As Terkel pursues AT&T;, Diane “can’t surrender the constitution fast enough” Feinstein has just announced her support for extending immunity to the telecommunications industry.