Anderson Cooper clearly defines the old expression, "Letting the Fox
into the Hen House".
Just one more example of the corrupt, two-face monster our Nation's
Political Parties have evolved into.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/19/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Boardman writes: "What does yellow journalism red-baiting sound like?"
Anderson Cooper. (photo: CNN)
Anderson Cooper Offers No Apology for Slandering Bernie Sanders
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
19 October 15
Who was the richest person in CNN’s Democratic presidential debate?
The richest person in the Democratic presidential candidate debate on
October 10 was not a candidate. The richest person on that Las Vegas stage
was CNN moderator and Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper, whose $100 million
net worth ($100,000,000) is greater than all the candidates’ worth combined
(about $84,000,000). In a very real, if unspoken sense, this “debate” was
more like an exclusive club interview with Cooper vetting the applicants
for
their class credentials.
These class aspects of the debate went unmentioned. In American politics,
class issues have traditionally gone unmentioned. The tacit understanding
is
that if you have the bad taste to ask, then you have no class. If you have
class, you will have the right opinions. This year is different because of
Bernie Sanders, part of whose popular appeal is that he is so clearly the
scion of no great wealth and even less pretension. Sanders is calling for a
social revolution against the ruling class of millionaires and
billionaires,
yet even he did not publicly object to having multi-millionaire Anderson
Cooper of the One Per Cent running the show. Sanders likely understands
that
his best chance to win is not to confront the rich, but to surround them
with everyone else whose net worth is more like his ($700,000) or less.
Net worth is notoriously hard to pin down with any accuracy, but ballpark
figures are good enough at the highest levels, even if the numbers usually
come from the candidates themselves. In a candidates’ net worth listing
published October 13, the Democrats were evaluated as follows (with an
alternative set of estimates in parenthesis):
• Hillary Clinton: $45 million ($31.2 herself, with Bill $111 million)
• Lincoln Chaffee: $32 million ($31.9 million, mostly his wife’s
trust)
• Jim Webb: $6 million ($4.6 million)
• Bernie Sanders: $700,000 ($528,014)
• Martin O’Malley: $-0- ($256,000)
By one recent measure, it takes a net worth of $1.2 million, minimum, to
make it into the top One Per Cent of richest Americans (usually accompanied
by pre-tax income of more than $300,000 annually). A US senator’s salary is
$192,600, which is amplified significantly by perks and benefits.
Cooper’s life of wealth illuminates his gift as a glib carnival barker
Like most debate moderators, Anderson Cooper seemed most interested in
promoting a food fight among the candidates. While he had snark for
everyone, his most provocative and least conscionable jibes were saved for
Sanders, served up with class-based relish.
What does yellow journalism red-baiting sound like? Cooper started with the
lurking horror of every unjustifiably rich person:
“Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a
socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How
can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
How could such a horror happen in America? That’s the question he seems to
be asking. But to ask it that way, Cooper has to be deceitful and spin the
Gallup poll to fit his meaning (Cooper’s spin reflects the conventional
coverage of the poll at the time). The real news from the June 2015 poll
was
that 47% of Americans were OK with electing a “socialist” (not further
defined by pollsters). That 47% is more than past polls, and those opposed
to a “socialist” make up only 50%, a difference close to the margin of
error. In other words, more than a year from the presidential election,
Gallup finds America more or less neutral on the question of whether or not
a candidate is “any kind of socialist.” For a Bernie kind of socialist, the
simple answer to getting elected is to make the kind of progress in the
next
year that he’s made in the past six months.
Cooper’s approach uses “socialism” as something that is by definition
pejorative and comes out of a deep, common bias in the US. The American
ruling class has cultivated fear of “socialism” for close to two centuries,
not because it’s a threat to people’s freedom but because it’s a threat to
the wealth and power of people like the 158 families funding most of the
2016 race for the presidency.
Anderson Coopers class roots: Vanderbilt, Dalton, Yale, CIA
Anderson Cooper was not only born into wealth and power, he has lived the
life of that class, as even his official CNN bio affirms. After attending
New York’s Dalton School, Cooper graduated from Yale College in 1989 with a
BA in political science and two summer internships at the CIA. He also
studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.
Cooper kept his CIA experience in the closet until September 2006, when an
unnamed web site reported that Cooper had worked for the CIA. Cooper
responded on his CNN blog in minimizing, dismissive fashion. He said the
website didn’t have its facts straight, but cited no errors. His own facts
are well fudged – “for a couple of months over two summers I worked at the
CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia…. It was pretty bureaucratic and
mundane.” Cooper doesn’t say what he did (of course) or even what years he
was there (1987 and 1988, in the aftermath of William J. Casey’s
directorship). Whatever Cooper did at the CIA, he was there when the CIA
was
running an illegal war in Nicaragua (and another in El Salvador) and the
agency’s activities were subject to serious congressional efforts to curb
them (the Boland Amendment).
When Sanders offered no direct answer to the question of how a “socialist”
could win a general election, Cooper followed up more vituperatively and
dishonestly:
“The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying
to get at. You — the — the Republican attack ad against you in a general
election — it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
You
honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not
a capitalist. Doesn’t — doesn’t that ad write itself?”
Cooper’s first dishonesty here is asking the “electability” question here
only of Sanders. Yes, everyone assumes Hillary Clinton is “electable,” ¬but
O’Malley, Chaffee, or Webb? They’re not even as close to getting nominated
as Sanders. Why would anyone assume they’re electable in anything but a
flip-of-the-coin sense? Cooper’s addressing the electability question only
to Sanders may actually be a measure of how strong Cooper believes Sanders
is or may be.
Then Cooper stated: “You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.” He said
it
as if there were no question that supporting the Sandinistas was a really
bad thing. That’s the talking point on Breitbart, National Review, and
other
right-wing sites for whom Cooper was carrying water. On Just Foreign
Policy,
Robert Naiman posted a prompt denunciation of Cooper for playing the
knee-jerk, pro-war media honcho.
Cooper on record in support of illegal war supported by drug traffic
Supporting the Sandinistas in the 1980s was, and is, a principled position.
The Sandinistas had overthrown the Somoza government, one of the most
vicious of the US-backed dictatorships in Central America. President Reagan
decided to wage an illegal covert war against the Sandinistas, using the
CIA
to recruit the Contra army to fight in Nicaragua, supported by
CIA-supported
drug traffic to the US. Cooper refers to none of this, which was all taking
place while he was doing summer internships at the CIA. Is Cooper a CIA
asset? Hard to know, but he plays one pretty well on TV. A Cooper-CIA tie
is
perfectly credible – there’s means, motive, and opportunity all round. And
in 1988, Bob Woodward wasn’t getting any younger.
Supporting the illegal Contra war, run on drug money, is an unprincipled
position, but Cooper clearly implies that it’s still his position. Like the
US government, Cooper showed no respect for the International Court of
Justice, which issued a 1986 ruling strongly supporting Nicaragua’s claims
against the US, including the US mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The ruling
awarded reparations to Nicaragua that the US never paid. The lone dissent
in
the decision came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, an American judge. The US
defended its position in the UN Security Council in soviet-style, blocking
any action with numerous vetoes. The UN General Assembly voted
overwhelmingly in support of Nicaragua, with only the US, El Salvador, and
Israel opposed.
For Cooper to say that Sanders supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would
be high praise in most of the world. Only in the boxed-in, unilluminated
world of American media can it pass for a criticism without bring the house
down in laughter. That’s another of the US government successes brought on
by secret agencies like the CIS and fellow-travelers like multi-millionaire
Anderson Cooper.
Bernie Sanders challenged the yellow journalist on the issue of Hillary
Clinton’s emails. His was an act of generosity and presidential stature.
None of his fellow candidates had the courage or character to repudiate
Cooper’s shameless red-baiting, not on Nicaragua, and not on his next
slander, “You honeymooned in the Soviet Union.”
Integrity is not a quality Cooper showed much interest in
Almost surely Cooper knew that statement was a dishonest low blow, a neat
way to brutalize the truth without actually lying. Again Cooper was
irresponsibly peddling another right wing trope, used with similar
hypocrisy
by George Will and others.
As a Daily Kos blog details, the Sanders honeymoon was also part of a 1956
sister-cities program initiated by the Eisenhower administration. In 1988,
Sanders and his wife Jane were married, marched in a Memorial Day parade,
then headed off to the Russian city of Yaroslavl on their “honeymoon.”
Somehow that doesn’t have the same impact as when Anderson Cooper lies
about
it.
Cooper’s last dishonesty was: “And just this weekend you said you’re not a
capitalist.” Once again Cooper acted as if that was an undeniable evil,
case
closed. But the instance he referred to on NBC was not so simple, and
Cooper
provided no context. On NBC, Sanders bristled when his interviewer asked if
Sanders was a “socialist,” since Sanders has referred to himself a
“democratic socialist” for decades. Sanders asked the NBC toady parrot if
he
ever asked others if they were “capitalists” and the guy cowered out. He
asked Sanders if he was a capitalist. And Sanders said, yet again, that
he’s
a democratic socialist.
Returning to his distorted framing bias, a “Republican attack ad,” Cooper
asked, “Doesn’t that ad write itself?” Well, so what if it does? That just
means Republican ad writers have as little integrity as Cooper, and maybe
that’s what they’re all paid for.
As Sanders put in on CNN at the end of his opening statement:
“What this campaign is about is whether we can mobilize our people to take
back our government from a handful of billionaires and create the vibrant
democracy we know we can and should have.”
We are at the beginning of what might be a long learning curve as we find
out what our country is truly about. Bernie Sanders offers an opportunity
to
look at realities in broad daylight and make up our minds about them.
Anderson Cooper is but one of a legion of self-serving, self-preserving One
Per Cent propagandists who will do all they can to keep the Sanders message
in the dark.
________________________________________
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Anderson Cooper. (photo: CNN)
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33022-focus-anderson-cooper-o
ffers-no-apology-for-slandering-bernie-sandershttp://readersupportednews.org
/opinion2/277-75/33022-focus-anderson-cooper-offers-no-apology-for-slanderin
g-bernie-sanders
Anderson Cooper Offers No Apology for Slandering Bernie Sanders
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
19 October 15
ho was the richest person in CNN’s Democratic presidential debate?
The richest person in the Democratic presidential candidate debate on
October 10 was not a candidate. The richest person on that Las Vegas stage
was CNN moderator and Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper, whose $100 million
net worth ($100,000,000) is greater than all the candidates’ worth combined
(about $84,000,000). In a very real, if unspoken sense, this “debate” was
more like an exclusive club interview with Cooper vetting the applicants
for
their class credentials.
These class aspects of the debate went unmentioned. In American politics,
class issues have traditionally gone unmentioned. The tacit understanding
is
that if you have the bad taste to ask, then you have no class. If you have
class, you will have the right opinions. This year is different because of
Bernie Sanders, part of whose popular appeal is that he is so clearly the
scion of no great wealth and even less pretension. Sanders is calling for a
social revolution against the ruling class of millionaires and
billionaires,
yet even he did not publicly object to having multi-millionaire Anderson
Cooper of the One Per Cent running the show. Sanders likely understands
that
his best chance to win is not to confront the rich, but to surround them
with everyone else whose net worth is more like his ($700,000) or less.
Net worth is notoriously hard to pin down with any accuracy, but ballpark
figures are good enough at the highest levels, even if the numbers usually
come from the candidates themselves. In a candidates’ net worth listing
published October 13, the Democrats were evaluated as follows (with an
alternative set of estimates in parenthesis):
• Hillary Clinton: $45 million ($31.2 herself, with Bill $111 million)
• Lincoln Chaffee: $32 million ($31.9 million, mostly his wife’s
trust)
• Jim Webb: $6 million ($4.6 million)
• Bernie Sanders: $700,000 ($528,014)
• Martin O’Malley: $-0- ($256,000)
By one recent measure, it takes a net worth of $1.2 million, minimum, to
make it into the top One Per Cent of richest Americans (usually accompanied
by pre-tax income of more than $300,000 annually). A US senator’s salary is
$192,600, which is amplified significantly by perks and benefits.
Cooper’s life of wealth illuminates his gift as a glib carnival barker
Like most debate moderators, Anderson Cooper seemed most interested in
promoting a food fight among the candidates. While he had snark for
everyone, his most provocative and least conscionable jibes were saved for
Sanders, served up with class-based relish.
What does yellow journalism red-baiting sound like? Cooper started with the
lurking horror of every unjustifiably rich person:
“Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a
socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How
can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
How could such a horror happen in America? That’s the question he seems to
be asking. But to ask it that way, Cooper has to be deceitful and spin the
Gallup poll to fit his meaning (Cooper’s spin reflects the conventional
coverage of the poll at the time). The real news from the June 2015 poll
was
that 47% of Americans were OK with electing a “socialist” (not further
defined by pollsters). That 47% is more than past polls, and those opposed
to a “socialist” make up only 50%, a difference close to the margin of
error. In other words, more than a year from the presidential election,
Gallup finds America more or less neutral on the question of whether or not
a candidate is “any kind of socialist.” For a Bernie kind of socialist, the
simple answer to getting elected is to make the kind of progress in the
next
year that he’s made in the past six months.
Cooper’s approach uses “socialism” as something that is by definition
pejorative and comes out of a deep, common bias in the US. The American
ruling class has cultivated fear of “socialism” for close to two centuries,
not because it’s a threat to people’s freedom but because it’s a threat to
the wealth and power of people like the 158 families funding most of the
2016 race for the presidency.
Anderson Coopers class roots: Vanderbilt, Dalton, Yale, CIA
Anderson Cooper was not only born into wealth and power, he has lived the
life of that class, as even his official CNN bio affirms. After attending
New York’s Dalton School, Cooper graduated from Yale College in 1989 with a
BA in political science and two summer internships at the CIA. He also
studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.
Cooper kept his CIA experience in the closet until September 2006, when an
unnamed web site reported that Cooper had worked for the CIA. Cooper
responded on his CNN blog in minimizing, dismissive fashion. He said the
website didn’t have its facts straight, but cited no errors. His own facts
are well fudged – “for a couple of months over two summers I worked at the
CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia…. It was pretty bureaucratic and
mundane.” Cooper doesn’t say what he did (of course) or even what years he
was there (1987 and 1988, in the aftermath of William J. Casey’s
directorship). Whatever Cooper did at the CIA, he was there when the CIA
was
running an illegal war in Nicaragua (and another in El Salvador) and the
agency’s activities were subject to serious congressional efforts to curb
them (the Boland Amendment).
When Sanders offered no direct answer to the question of how a “socialist”
could win a general election, Cooper followed up more vituperatively and
dishonestly:
“The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying
to get at. You — the — the Republican attack ad against you in a general
election — it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
You
honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not
a capitalist. Doesn’t — doesn’t that ad write itself?”
Cooper’s first dishonesty here is asking the “electability” question here
only of Sanders. Yes, everyone assumes Hillary Clinton is “electable,” but
O’Malley, Chaffee, or Webb? They’re not even as close to getting nominated
as Sanders. Why would anyone assume they’re electable in anything but a
flip-of-the-coin sense? Cooper’s addressing the electability question only
to Sanders may actually be a measure of how strong Cooper believes Sanders
is or may be.
Then Cooper stated: “You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.” He said
it
as if there were no question that supporting the Sandinistas was a really
bad thing. That’s the talking point on Breitbart, National Review, and
other
right-wing sites for whom Cooper was carrying water. On Just Foreign
Policy,
Robert Naiman posted a prompt denunciation of Cooper for playing the
knee-jerk, pro-war media honcho.
Cooper on record in support of illegal war supported by drug traffic
Supporting the Sandinistas in the 1980s was, and is, a principled position.
The Sandinistas had overthrown the Somoza government, one of the most
vicious of the US-backed dictatorships in Central America. President Reagan
decided to wage an illegal covert war against the Sandinistas, using the
CIA
to recruit the Contra army to fight in Nicaragua, supported by
CIA-supported
drug traffic to the US. Cooper refers to none of this, which was all taking
place while he was doing summer internships at the CIA. Is Cooper a CIA
asset? Hard to know, but he plays one pretty well on TV. A Cooper-CIA tie
is
perfectly credible – there’s means, motive, and opportunity all round. And
in 1988, Bob Woodward wasn’t getting any younger.
Supporting the illegal Contra war, run on drug money, is an unprincipled
position, but Cooper clearly implies that it’s still his position. Like the
US government, Cooper showed no respect for the International Court of
Justice, which issued a 1986 ruling strongly supporting Nicaragua’s claims
against the US, including the US mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The ruling
awarded reparations to Nicaragua that the US never paid. The lone dissent
in
the decision came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, an American judge. The US
defended its position in the UN Security Council in soviet-style, blocking
any action with numerous vetoes. The UN General Assembly voted
overwhelmingly in support of Nicaragua, with only the US, El Salvador, and
Israel opposed.
For Cooper to say that Sanders supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would
be high praise in most of the world. Only in the boxed-in, unilluminated
world of American media can it pass for a criticism without bring the house
down in laughter. That’s another of the US government successes brought on
by secret agencies like the CIS and fellow-travelers like multi-millionaire
Anderson Cooper.
Bernie Sanders challenged the yellow journalist on the issue of Hillary
Clinton’s emails. His was an act of generosity and presidential stature.
None of his fellow candidates had the courage or character to repudiate
Cooper’s shameless red-baiting, not on Nicaragua, and not on his next
slander, “You honeymooned in the Soviet Union.”
Integrity is not a quality Cooper showed much interest in
Almost surely Cooper knew that statement was a dishonest low blow, a neat
way to brutalize the truth without actually lying. Again Cooper was
irresponsibly peddling another right wing trope, used with similar
hypocrisy
by George Will and others.
As a Daily Kos blog details, the Sanders honeymoon was also part of a 1956
sister-cities program initiated by the Eisenhower administration. In 1988,
Sanders and his wife Jane were married, marched in a Memorial Day parade,
then headed off to the Russian city of Yaroslavl on their “honeymoon.”
Somehow that doesn’t have the same impact as when Anderson Cooper lies
about
it.
Cooper’s last dishonesty was: “And just this weekend you said you’re not a
capitalist.” Once again Cooper acted as if that was an undeniable evil,
case
closed. But the instance he referred to on NBC was not so simple, and
Cooper
provided no context. On NBC, Sanders bristled when his interviewer asked if
Sanders was a “socialist,” since Sanders has referred to himself a
“democratic socialist” for decades. Sanders asked the NBC toady parrot if
he
ever asked others if they were “capitalists” and the guy cowered out. He
asked Sanders if he was a capitalist. And Sanders said, yet again, that
he’s
a democratic socialist.
Returning to his distorted framing bias, a “Republican attack ad,” Cooper
asked, “Doesn’t that ad write itself?” Well, so what if it does? That just
means Republican ad writers have as little integrity as Cooper, and maybe
that’s what they’re all paid for.
As Sanders put in on CNN at the end of his opening statement:
“What this campaign is about is whether we can mobilize our people to take
back our government from a handful of billionaires and create the vibrant
democracy we know we can and should have.”
We are at the beginning of what might be a long learning curve as we find
out what our country is truly about. Bernie Sanders offers an opportunity
to
look at realities in broad daylight and make up our minds about them.
Anderson Cooper is but one of a legion of self-serving, self-preserving One
Per Cent propagandists who will do all they can to keep the Sanders message
in the dark.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
