Ostensible Diversity and the Painful Demise of “Truthiness”

by Scott Creighton

“During a war, news should be given out
for instruction rather than information.”

Joseph Goebbels

“A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity“

Joseph Goebbels

A year ago, June of 2009, I wrote about Steven Colbert’s deplorable supplication to the Neoliberal Party’s Global Free Market Wars.  I wrote about how he went to Iraq just after Obama took office to run a pep-rally designed to bring the “liberal” left into line to support the imperial war effort. It was a disgusting display, vile even, which proved at least one thing; Steven Colbert has absolutely no moral or ethical courage what-so-ever.

Yet his ratings and his popularity with the “left” continued.

After getting his “high and tight” Colbert ran through the crowd of service men and women, giving “high-5s” to everyone…
The soldiers are getting paid a thousand dollars a month to put their lives on the line to pacify a nation for corporate interests and Colbert gets paid about $400,000 a month to help sell the war to the left.  Meanwhile, back at home, as Colbert himself pointed out earlier last week, soldier’s homes are being foreclosed on at a rate 4 times that of the national average.”  American Everyman

Colbert is at it again this time in an even more disdainful display of mindless ultranationalist propaganda designed to ensure that the “left”, who are traditionally opposed to illegal wars of aggression and occupations, tow the Neoliberal Party line when it comes to “supporting the troops” (read as “support The Endless War on Terror”)


Just days before the 9th anniversary of the false flag event known as 9/11 and only a week after President Obama fraudulently announced the end of combat operations in Iraq (combined with the staged “pullout” covered by another fake “news” personality, Rachel Maddow), Colbert had Vice President Joe Biden on his show as his guest.

The audience of the show appears to be full of military personnel in full uniform, sitting with their respective branches of service (Navy, Army, Marines, Air Force) so the reception of this “show” was about as enthusiastic as one would expect from people who know damn-well their superior officers are watching them very closely.

Colbert started off the segment asking his audience to welcome the vice president… and to “thank” him…   “thank” him.

“My guest tonight is, I hope, the reason I have been strip-searched 14 times today. Please welcome, and thank, Vice President Joe Biden.” Colbert

He never explains why his audience (service men and women) should “thank” Joe Biden before he hops up and runs over to a door prop set up in the middle of the stage.  From offstage, two servicemen (Army) run in and stand on opposite sides of the door-prop, checking the trim around the door, then they give Colbert a “thumbs up” signal, and believe it or not, Steven Colbert then kicks in the prop door and rushes in with his hands raised in victory.

“I hope I didn’t startle you with my heroics over there” Colbert after kicking in the prop door.

Had this putrid display been performed on the Bill O’Reilly show just prior to the passage of President Bush’s “surge”, there wouldn’t be enough pixels in all the “internets” for the “liberal” left to convey their moral outrage and disgust at the glorification of the current stormtrooper tactics our troops are forced to perform in Iraq.   Yet now, those same “liberals” on the left just laugh it up.

How savage and offensive this must seem to the people of Iraq and countless other nations across the world who live with the constant threat that if they don’t support the occupation of their newly neoliberalized nation, they can and do fully expect this same kind of treatment. Usually ending with someone being hauled off, a father or a brother, with a black hood over their heads never to be seen again… leaving the women and children in tears on the street.

And Colbert makes it into a joke facilitated by a prop door and a couple of actually soldiers also being used as props. And the antiwar “liberal” left yucks it up.
Listen to what Nir Rosen had to say via phone interview on Democracy Now! the day after President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq;

[Obama] said that the US has paid a high price, a huge price. Not as huge as the Iraqis have paid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who were rendered in American detention, their lives ruined for years, children who didn’t know where their fathers were.
… Well, I mean, the [inaudible] Americans [inaudible] on the street, for the most part, [inaudible] arresting people, kicking down doors. And that’s been the case for the last year.
… So the Americans are still engaged in combat, and you have 4,000 American special forces troops who are going out with Iraqi special forces. Basically they can kill whoever they want, whenever they want. They’re nominally beholden to Prime Minister Maliki, but in fact they operate pretty much independently. Nir Rosen, journalist in Iraq

Is this now just a joke to the “liberals” who watch Steven Colbert’s show?  The suffering, the tragedy, and the inhumanity we are visiting on the people of another nation?  Is it just a joke to them?  I suppose it is… much to our shame.
The rest of the “interview” with Joe Biden went as much like a pure propaganda infomercial as you could possibly imagine from Fox News back in the Bush/Cheney days. The following are the “hard-hitting” questions Colbert put to the globalist Joe Biden…

“Sir, you were given the responsibility of helping to bring the Iraq War to a close… what were some of the greatest challenges the United States faced?”
“As a parent of someone who served in Iraq… do you think it is good for this country that only 1.5% of Americans served over in Iraq?”
“What can the American people do to honor the sacrifice these people (the troops) have made?”
“Over in Iraq, are going to actually get those troops out of there. As I have said… they have won it, they have won it, they have won it.”
“Shouldn’t we have a parade for the people who have won the war?”

Shouldn’t we have a parade for all those troops who came back from the war started with numberous lies, the war that was designed to hand over control of the natural resources of Iraq to various oil companies, the war that was specifically privatized to provide the maximum profit benefit, and the war in which billions of dollars went missing. The war that killed a million Iraqis, made 4 million homeless in their own country, the war which produced an era of renditions and torture on scale never before imagined in this country or anywhere else in the world.  Shouldn’t we have a parade?

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who were rendered in American detention, their lives ruined for years, children who didn’t know where their fathers were. A couple of million displaced internally and abroad. Iraq is a shattered country…
… Life, in most ways for people, has gotten much worse. In terms of services, most places here have one hour of electricity a day. People can’t go to sleep at night—it’s like 120 degrees—until 3:00 in the morning or quite late, because they’re waiting for the power to come back just so they can turn on the AC on. No sewage, dirty water, mounds of trash on the street. Baghdad and other areas are heavily militarized, which means that every minute or so when you’re driving, you get stopped by police or army. They search your car.  Nir Rosen

Shouldn’t we have a parade?
Now, if you think this is all pretty despicable, you haven’t even heard the good part yet.  Wait till you hear Steven Colbert praise George W. Bush for lying us into war in the first place… and I am not kidding.

Colbert -”Now let’s talk about President Bush for a second. The administration has gotten some critique from me and my conservative friends that you have not given enough credit to President Bush. Would you like to take this opportunity right now to look up there and say “thank you’.”
Biden – “Mr. President. Thank you. You have honored these guys, you have honored these women, you have honored these troops and I have known you your entire 8 years in office, Mr. President… I have never known a time when you didn’t care about what happened (points to the troops in the audience)… you deserve a lot of credit Mr. President”
Colbert – “Mr. President. I never disagreed with your policy. So I thank you, and I never disagreed”

The age of “truthiness” is over and the age of supplication has begun for Steven Colbert. In order to keep his keys to the green zone of celebrity, Steven Colbert is forced, almost routinely these days, to grovel at the feet of his masters, both present and past.
It’s a sad commentary on the condition of the American liberal identity, that its heroes, once defiant and courageous, now find themselves in a position to publicly debase themselves and our previous efforts in such a deplorable and public way, just to maintain the lifestyle they have grown accustomed to. But always remember, Colbert had a choice and he should never be forgiven for the one he has made.
The lesson of Phil Donahue is certainly not lost on the media celebrities of today.