America This Week, December 8th, 2023: "The Hawks Who Cried Wolf"

It's kind of iconic, Matt.

It's kind of a troll, actually. I mean, it would be if there was a little, you know, star on that curtain or something, it would be, you know, better.

You look like state media in a state that I would try to emigrate from, you know?

You look like the Manchurian candidate. Awesome. Yeah, yeah, you know if Lawrence Harvey had stayed in North Korea and made broadcasts?

I'm sorry, I'm just going to go for it. I'll have a brown one that's good to match my tan camouflage, you know, perfect, no gray, actually steel gray, steel gray background.

And I'll try to confine myself to single, syllable, syllable words and short sentences.

Insurrectionist and all of those things which you might be actually, I mean, how well do we really know each other actually?

I tried to rewrite it once as like a sort of more readable, humorous version of what of what's actually happening in these passages. I got, I think I got to, like Genesis 28 or something like that, or I may have gotten all the way through Genesis. It was a while ago. I think it was a pretty strong piece of writing if I, if I go back and find it.

Well, maybe he didn't, Jefferson definitely did. Jefferson rewrote the Bible, or he edited it. And I actually wrote an e-book years ago, which was a commentary on the book of Genesis and Exodus. In the oh yeah, in the kind of spirit of Mark Twain, Nice.

It, it grew on me. As a child, it was compulsory, and as an adult, I've started to see our times as an extension of biblical problems, not, not prophecies. But we seem to, you know, we've got the Tower of Babel and AI.

Cities that might be destroyed in various ways, like Sodom and Gomorrah. It's an it's a book that's full of action, and you don't realize that as a kid.

You know, we should go back to it, maybe we should do a biblical commentary podcast.

It's about healings and persecutions, basically.

I was reading the Book of Acts this morning and, you know, Paul just got thrown in jail by Felix for another two years.

It's about guys sailing around city to city, being persecuted and keeping the faith. And then suddenly there comes revelation, which with all this, you know, exotic apocalyptic action to make up for, you know, all the....

I mean, it's got that sort of, you know, sort of hamlet meets, you know, 80s teen movie thing with Jesus for a while, right? You know, he kind of does that. You know, woe is me. I haven't figured out the world yet, even though I'm young and beautiful. That whole thing goes on for a while, and then it's just like blood and guts and killing.

Well, why don't I just read from?

Let's start with a BBC news story from yesterday or today, actually.

This being Thursday, this was coming out tomorrow, so today is December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day, right? is that, right?

The White House has warned that U.S. funds for Ukraine could soon run out. The Ukrainian official said that failure to secure more U.S. aid would mean, quote a very high possibility unquote, that the war will be lost to Russia. Blah, blah, blah.

And this prompts Walter a series of comments from the White House Should we start with Kirby or Biden? What's your favorite?

And what's he saying?

I mean to anyone but America to hear that. Because, you know, the notion of someone who can barely explain what's possible being the commander in chief of these American troops does send chills down my spine.

Like, it's like a, you know, sort of a big bowl of cheerios in there.

And there's just thoughts moving around, right, right? Normally, that would be, I mean, I remember that being a little scary. At the end of the Reagan years, especially since Reagan was kind of a more belligerent personality. When it came to foreign policy, he was probably more genial in his personal life, I would think.

But it freaks me out personally every time I'm watching, so I try not to, but I guess the rest of the world has to watch. So what do they think?

But, you know, concentrating on the, you know, material significance of what he's saying. He's somehow preparing the American people, or at least warning them of some, you know, direct fight between the world's two greatest nuclear superpowers. And he's just doing it rather casually, and I think that he's forgetting that, you know this, this, this scenario in which troops just fight, sort of G.I Joe style, might be interrupted by nuclear explosions.

You know, will it get to that that quickly? How long do we contemplate just fighting them on the ground before it goes nuclear? I've never been clear on that.

Should we? Let's play that one if we can?

Then what? Then? Where does he go? because right then he's up against the eastern flank of NATO.

And so so, I mean, talk about extortion, either pay up, you know, America, or or have your blood spilled. Those are the those are your choices. That they admitted that the Ukraine war is almost lost, except for our money, was kind of new.

Apparently, so, you know, that may be. The secret message here is that they're lowering expectations about Ukraine and preparing to blame the other side for not, you know, paying that last in a installment. That would have changed everything. I sense it's political because they're going into an election year with a war. They've spent their credibility on and a lot of money disrupted the economy of Europe. You know, Nord Stream, et cetera. And they're going to lose, and it's going to be because this bill wasn't passed.

In 2004, but also in 2008, was to talk about Afghanistan is the good war, but Iraq is the lunatic, crazy war. Some of the Democrats did right, right.

But the clear thing is like, you know, don't call us softies, where we're not doves or anything. You know, we're still willing to go to war, just, you know, not in Iraq necessarily, or not without inspections or whatever that is. The Republicans are now pulling something a little similar where they're trying to.

Separate funding for Ukraine, for funding from Israel. I think both of, I'm not sure either. Conflict is really popular in the end, but they're trying to sell themselves as being for one and against the other. And maybe this is the White House's way of parrying back, you know, on that politically, by, I don't know, threatening a Holocaust or something.

I'm not, I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but what do you? what do you think on that?

He's suggesting is the way we should want it. These wars in which we actually fight and die are horrible things. We should be paying for others to do that, and that's bothered me. Throughout this conflict, we, you know, we've gotten the weirdest reporting on all sorts of spectacular oddities of, you know, of heroism on on the part of the Ukrainians.

And you know, we got the ins and outs of Putin's supposed health problems and so on. But the reality of all these hundreds of thousands of people dying has been almost completely expunged from from view for Americans.

You know, I don't, I don't see bodies lying in trenches, blowing up, you know, blown apart. Maybe if they had, maybe if they had been more graphic about that reality in reporting, we'd be more afraid of of joining such a fight. But because the whole thing has had this abstract air about it, the warnings to seem kind of notional.

This began, you know, I look back at this this week. There was this amazing story in the New York Times last March. Fact and myth making blend in Ukraine's information war, experts say. Ghost stories like The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island, both of questionable veracity, are propaganda or morale boosters, or perhaps both. And they talk about how, you know, stories like the the idea that all the soldiers in Snake Island died, giving the Russians the finger, which turned out not to be true, or the ghost of Kiev. Fighter pilot, pilot. Yes, they may be a myth, but you know, they quote some people online saying, why can't we just let people believe some things? You know? If the Russians believe that it brings fear, if the Ukrainians believe it, it gives them hope.

Then they're appraising the the platforms for not censoring the untrue information. And then later, there was a moment when Joe Biden said Russians might be preparing to use chemical weapons in Ukraine. And then right afterwards, in the John Kirby moment, this this time, they actually came out and said, No, that's actually not true, there's no evidence of that. And then there was a story in NBC with the headline In a break with the past. U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid.

And there's a whole story about how, you know, we're using information as a weapon when confidence in the accuracy of the information isn't high. They're doing things just to try to get inside Putin's head.

So, I mean, it's a little bit unusual to announce that the the chief executive and commander in chief may be lying like to the country on purpose. And you know, now it's playing out as you might expect. Like, if, if a leader, like if Stalin, was telling all the Soviet citizens that everything's cool. Like, you know, there's no risk whatsoever of, you know, any kind of German invasion, although he probably actually did think that. And then, 10 minutes later, the Nazis are knocking on the door of Stalingrad and Moscow. It can be kind of a shock to the population. I feel a little.

It's not like that, but exactly. But to be told all year that things are going great, we just need a little bit more money to get over the hump. And then all of a sudden the whole area is going to be overrun. And they're going to be invading a NATO country. Next, if we don't, you know, with American troops shedding blood. If we don't get that 61 billion dollars, I mean, is that is that politics, is that is that information warfare?

Or is that true or what? Like these are the this is the peril of lying to your public, right?

And apparently there are no rules for them. But what wasn't included in either of these little speeches or presentations was any evidence that the Russians intend to plan to, or could overrun, overrun all of Ukraine, you know, a country which they have been losing, a lot of people fighting for a sliver of. But now, apparently could gulp down like a big Mac. And because there was no evidence there, no detail, it was just a pure thought experiment and a rather ghoulish one.

And I don't know what to think of it. There's not been a war in my lifetime, I can't think of one that has been more opaque to me.

Frankly, I think disinformation has been the rule in terms of Americans'.

Ideas about this, about this war, I don't. I can't think about, think back to any period in which I felt I was being accurately informed. I know that I've been being propagandized the whole time, partly because they announced they would and that it was good to do. And America now is going to wake up suddenly going, What the hell, how did we lose that?

We were winning right up until the last minute and that's the, you know, that's a terrible bind they put themselves in. If I could go back in time and say, here's the reason. You shouldn't be spreading these morale building rumors. Because when they turn out not to be true, it's going to be a big explosion of skepticism and disgust.

This creates uncertainty, distrust. You're not sure to whom to turn. You're not going to turn to NBC and Ken Delaney, who was just praising that stuff, these tactics, two minutes ago. So you're going to go to an alternative source for your information. But then they turn around and say, after that, well, we have this problem with trust in media, and we need to fix it by imposing top-down controls on misinformation.

The next thing, you know, you have critics of American foreign policy like the Gray Zone. Their reporters are being detained and on the way into England, or being reported to Twitter, or having their GoFundMe stopped. Or it's consortium news blocked by Newsguard, or whatever it is. You see what I'm saying, they create the trust problem by doing this thing.