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Good evening. It's Thursday, December 14.
Tonight: in Washington, the U.S. Security State pretty much always gets its way. This, yet again is exactly what happened over the last 24 hours as first, the United States Senate and then, the House voted on a bipartisan basis to renew and extend the FBI's power to spy on the communications of American citizens without warrants of any kind despite mountains of evidence that the FBI has been abusing that power and despite endless complaints and attacks on the FBI by congressional Republicans, many of whom voted to extend this power. Over the past two weeks, we had two lawmakers on our show, Senator Mike Lee, of Utah, and Congressman Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, both of whom held out real hope that this time Congress would do its duty and at least impose limits, safeguards and reforms on the FBI as a way of addressing all of the times they got caught abusing these powers. I told each of them that while I wanted to believe them, I was highly skeptical, given how many times I've seen exactly this happen over the years, namely that it seemed like there was an effort to try to limit the spying powers of the U.S. government, and yet always, in the end, they get enough votes to prevent any reforms. Unfortunately, my skepticism was validated. We'll show you what happened – how the FBI yet again won the right to hold on to this truly dangerous and authoritarian power – and, most of all, who in Washington is responsible for it.
Then, it is hardly a secret that the primary ideology of the corporate media is blind loyalty to the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon, and the rest of the agencies composing what Dwight Eisenhower, on his way out the door called the military-industrial complex. Still, in a sewer of corporate media employees who perform this function, none is as corrupt about it, as mindlessly subservient to the CIA's talking points and agenda, as Natasha Bertrand of CNN – who proved her usefulness in this function by becoming the queen of the most deranged components of Russiagate – no CIA conspiracy theory was beneath her dignity to spread and then she became the first person in media to spread the CIA lie, before the 2020 election, that the Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Bertrand has a new article on the Biden administration's alleged view of the war in Israel and it is really worth looking at just to see the kinds of rotted journalistic tactics that are not just acceptable but propel these people to ascend the corporate media ladder.
After that GOP presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy appeared on a CNN town hall last night with one of the network's personalities, Abby Phillip, who went to CNN from being classified as a reporter with The Washington Post. Phillip asked Vivek about his statement that January 6 was “an inside job,” something he first said on the show when I was interviewing him and then something he repeated at the last Republican presidential debate. CNN's Abby Phillip sought to prove that this was a false conspiracy but rather than letting Vivek answer her question, she used the tactic that has become the most common among incompetent TV interviews – any time you see someone being heralded as a great interviewer on cable, it's almost always because they do this – she just simply refused to let him speak, constantly interrupting him every third word, talking over him in large part because she just had no idea what she was talking about, and in part because much of what Vivek was saying was demonstrably true but she really believed it was false because CNN never allows its host to tell its audience about it. And so, she's never heard it before. There's really a lot of illustrative meaning from this quite contentious exchange between Vivek and the CNN person so we want to break it down for you and show you the meaning we think can be extracted.
And then, finally, Democrats are playing a deeply cynical, I would say, even jaded game when it comes to the posture of the Biden White House toward Israel's war in Gaza. From the start of the war, Joe Biden did what he has done his entire political career. He pledged complete, unlimited, unconditional financial and military support for Israel. He even flew to Israel to stand by the side of Benjamin Netanyahu as he promised that and he continued to do that to provide Israel with all the money and all the weapons they asked for. Even as the world began turning against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza and required the U.S. to isolate itself to continue to support Israel, he kept doing that as well. What changed, however, was that polls are now showing increasingly that the Democratic Party base is abandoning Biden. They're willing to not vote for him over his support for Israel's war. And ever since, Democrats have been making these theatrical gestures in public to pretend that they are chiding Israel and feigning concern about how they need to observe limits that they're not actually observing. And yet in reality, they're telling the Israelis the opposite, the things they're making repeatedly in public as well, that the U.S. financing and arming of Israel's war is not conditioned that any behavioral changes but instead is unconditional and eternal. No matter your views on this war, this sort of deceitful game-playing should repulse you on one of the most serious matters, this war in Gaza. The Biden administration is telling the Israelis one thing, doing that same thing, and yet trying to pretend in public that they're against the very actions that they continue to take, simply to deceive their voters into believing that they have now seen the light of day. And we're going to break that down and show you the evidence that demonstrates that they are, in fact, doing this.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
