I am Unspeakably Rude: Here is the Proof.

In response to an article written by Jenna McLaughlin, "In Response to Steve Bannon Appointment, Bill Aims to Get Politics Out of National Security Council," I wrote the following screed. It may still appear as a comment beneath the article, which was published on The Intercept on 2 February 2017. I wrote this comment on 5 February. The editors of The Intercept may have deleted it by now. 

For the record: I regret the statement that I make at the end of this rant. When I am angry, I got no class. And I definitely made a classless remark. I apologize for that one sentence. For the rest, I stand by every word. 

Esteban

February 5 2017, 10:47 p.m. 

Even the most well written lies are still only lies and this article is full of them. Jenna, you are better than this, and if all the bullshit published here was inserted by Betsy or some other editor then you need to resign in protest. 

Where shall I begin? 

1. You claim that the DNI and Chairman of the JCS are excluded. That is a lie, and you know it. They are not excluded. They are included anytime their institutions are involved—just as was done by other presidents in the past. 

2. For the Congress to attempt to interfere in such detailed fashion in the National Security Act of 1947 as amended is absurd. The NSC serves the president, it is in the White House, literally steps away from the Oval Office, and the president, the ultimate executive, should have the liberty to structure it at his pleasure. The president is authorized to ignore it, as he prefers. 

3. Demanding that anyone attending a Principal’s Committee meeting must be identified to the Congress is ludicrous. All that this would accomplish is introducing more sclerosis into already sclerotic bureaucracies and give the Gang of 8 more to leak. They already leak like a sieve, and always for the most partisan of political reasons. 

4. Resorting to obscure Obama regime employees to endorse this idiocy merely shows how stupid that it is. Loren Schulman? Really? Was that the best that you could do? Probably because nobody else would let you put the words that you wanted in their mouths! You hack! (Ed note: This is where I start to lose it).  

5. You even admit that Obama included David Axelrod! If you ask me who is a worse inclusion, Bannon or Axelrod, at worst you come up with a tie. A president can include anyone that he likes! And no president even needs to publish anything about it! Trump could have included Bannon and said nothing and been well within his presidential prerogatives! 

6. At least you put this in appropriate context, mentioning Nixon’s dependence upon that war criminal Kissinger, and Bush’s dependence upon Darth Cheney. But you fail to say that Cheney’s presence was imposed on Bush, Cheney was the real power in the Bush presidency, and where were the Congressional hearings on that!? 

7. You mention Bannon’s “reputation for toxic and controversial views on race, gender and religion,” and you wonder why you ridiculous neoliberals were so blindsided by Trump’s miraculous electoral triumph! Pandering to morons much? Enjoying your view from the Ivory Tower? You need to sit down and drink some coffee with real redneck intellectuals from the vast red expanse that elected Donald Trump! 

And forget California: when the 3 million illegal aliens that voted there are factored in, Trump won the popular vote! ?? Oh—and you forgot to mention that Bannon is a “white nationalist!” Amend this article immediately. A total oversight! 

But permit me to retort: I am a disabled Latino veteran, and my skin tone happens to be white if I do not spend time in the sun. I am also an unrepentant nationalist (and deplorable!). Does this make me a “white nationalist?” 

8. “Ignoring the intelligence community?” Jesus! You are a propagandistic hack! “…insists on making decisions without hearing the PDB (President's Daily Brief)?” He gets it in transcript form! It is infinitely faster to scan transcripts than it is to sit for some fool who politicizes the fact that he briefs the president! You are either a dumbass, or you have no affection for balance and truth! 

Maybe if you had even an iota of experience in, oh, I do not know, the intelligence community? Maybe then you would not write such stupidness. 

I have been a fan of yours in the past, but you really lost credibility with the spin in this article. You may have lost me forever, which underscores how fragile my trust in you was in the first place. 

I understand that journalism, real journalism, is virtually dead. All that remains is propaganda, and it is now legal to propagandize the American public, as you know. 

But you are under no obligation to participate in the drivel that suicided the Fourth Estate, the collusion with Clinton and Soros talking points. 

And I will say it again: if Betsy is inserting shit like this in your work then you need to resign! Any editor hacking up your work should be ashamed of him/her/itself and you should expose them! 

I can barely believe that you actually wrote this stinking piece of yellow journalism. 

But never mind me: I am just a redneck who is tired of the politicization of all media. Show me balanced and objective journalism today and I will show you Bigfoot. 

If The Intercept had any intellectual integrity you would publish opposing voices! Dissident voices! 

Refuse to participate in the dinosaur media campaign against Trump. This lost the neoliberals the last presidential election, it is why the NYT is renting out several floors of its building, it is why the NYT and the WaPo and The Intercept are little more than billionaire blogs! 

If you really want to publish something valuable, make Greenwald admit on the record that he sold out Snowden and that is why he fails to publish anything more from the most priceless cache of leakage in history! 

What deal did he strike with the intelligence community? What threats did they unlimber against him? I understand that he has loved ones and they are always vulnerable but making these deals with the devil is a doomed enterprise and it always turns out badly. They are not to be trusted. 

If you want to do something valuable, then publish the entirety of the Snowden cache unredacted on the net! The intelligence community has had years to compensate and adjust for their utter incompetence. 

But never mind me! Greenwald got as close as he could to a Pulitzer, he got his movie deals and his riches, and Poitras got her Academy Award. And that is all that it took to flush history down the toilet. 

You idealize them? Why? Do you not see the corruption that surrounds you? Are you already lost? You can be a part of it, or you can resist. 

In this article, I can only hope that they paid you more for anal. (Yes, I regret saying this. I got no class, I am guilty as charged.) 

And I hope that final sentence invalidates this entire screed. Because then you can rationalize your weakness and your brainwashed worldview. 

God forbid that I actually make you think. I do not know why I even bother with you.

So this is what I did today, among many other things. What did you do? 

The only addition that I would make to this comment at this point is I would point out that the business models of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Intercept are not viable absent their billionaire owner's deep pockets to bail them out when they fail to actually turn a profit. You can see the failure of the Fourth Estate even in The Guardian, which pleads for reader donations even though it already has a foundation subsidizing it. 

None of these newspapers can make money, and they still do not understand why. Even the election of Donald Trump, which not one of them forecasted, and which all of them attempted to sabotage, in concert with the entirety of the remaining dinosaur media, in rank collusion with the Clinton campaign itself, not even the election of the ultimate political outsider made them question themselves. 

These are propagandists who are incapable of self-criticism, they long ago sold their souls, and they wonder why their public approval ratings are at 16%, why nobody listens to them anymore, why nobody reads them, why nobody subscribes to them. 

The New York Times will say, "we have more digital subscribers than ever!" And they will claim that they turn a profit. But the Times is renting out several floors of its New York skyscraper, it is laying off editors and writers in droves, downsizing like mad, and former readers like me will never again subscribe to it, because it is a suborned collaborator in the sustained lame stream media campaign against the presidency of Donald Trump, a president that we, the people elected. 

In their intellectual arrogance, the Times refuses to even try to connect with members of the vast Silent Majority that elected Trump despite the connivance and machinations of the Clinton campaign. They know better than we do, they are the Ivory Tower intellectuals, we are the vast unwashed masses, we are Hillary's unrepentant "deplorables," and we are becoming quite adept at filtering out the propaganda published by the Times and that other "newspaper of record," The Washington Post. 

The Washington Post of course is the infamous newspaper of Watergate fame. At today's Post, Bernstein and Woodward would never be published, because the Post only publishes material that supports establishment perspectives. You will read no more principled dissent at the Post, nor the Times, nor any other dinosaur media. They are all establishment hacks, they serve the deep state, and they lie by omission and by spin. 

The Post of course is Washington's city newspaper, and it relies upon government leakers for its reportage. Their problem is that leaking in the age of XKEYSCORE is hazardous and their vaunted "sources" are increasingly of the anonymous variety, quoted on background, which also makes it impossible to quantify their integrity.

All of these dinosaur media titans are titans no more, they are all failing, and they deserve to fail. I will barely hold my nose and consent to scan them today, and I will never subscribe to them, and I only grudgingly link to their articles and I rarely share them, unless it is to mock them or debunk them. 

It is a commonplace that the lame stream media is owned by large corporations, billionaires, and Saudi princes. The failure, in fact, of these dinosaurs created a vast space for writers like myself and for a plethora of alternative media that is flourishing in the vacuum. If the public did not hunger for truth, for alternative views, then websites and writers like myself would never be read. 

I cite for your edification the example of the writer Michael Yon, who at this writing boasts nearly 619,000 subscribers to his page on Facebook. Yon defies characterization, you cannot say that he is a conservative, or a Tea Partier, or anything, really, but he curates a Facebook feed that keeps growing, and his comments feeds are the envy of all media. He is read by generals and federal bureaucrats, deep state potentates, soldiers and citizens alike.

Yon refuses to work for any media entity. He refuses to be edited. And this, along with his commitment to write truth as he knows it, is why he just keeps on growing, and the former giants of media are cratering. 

So today I went off my rocker a bit and I got rude. 

Maybe tomorrow I will do better.