The Guardian Gets It Right and Wrong and Backwards

This column in The Guardian today by former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is one of those articles that gets the facts right --

"The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: get Trump re-elected"  

...
The failures of the intelligence community before the Iraq war, the gullibility of much of the western media, as well as the cynical manipulation of both by the political class of the day, provide us with a stark reminder of what can go radically wrong.” and “Lies were reported as facts. Credible sceptics were downplayed, ignored or attacked as unpatriotic “appeasers"...

The thrill of landing a big “story” overtook the media’s fundamental duty to prevent the public from being deceived. Journalists who believed they were muscling up to a looming security threat turned out to be working instead against their own countries’ long-term interests. And in all this the Murdoch media were leading the pack across the anglosphere as the unrelenting cheerleaders for war – and vilifying those, like me, who opposed it.

-- but the conclusion maddeningly wrong.

The bitter lessons of Iraq appear to have been lost on Trump and the Murdoch empire that supports him.

Not true.  Trump and Murdoch have both clearly learned the most important lesson of all, because the bitter lessons of entire Bush Administration are as follows:

1.  A wholly incompetent Republican candidate can lie and cheat his way into an electoral college victory while losing the popular vote, and then turn right around and govern as though he had been given a mandate from Heaven.

2.  That Republican president can then immediately start undoing all the good his Democratic predecessor had done, beginning with massive, unpaid-for tax cuts for the wealthy.

3.  That Republican president can explicitly ignore an imminent threat to the United States because that threat is politically inconvenient for him.

4.  Once that threat strikes a crippling blow to the nation, that Republican president can pretend that it had been completely unforeseeable.

5.  Using the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio, that Republican president can then whitewash his catastrophic fuck-up into a moment of Epic Heroism.

6.  Using the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio, that Republican president can then exploit his catastrophic fuck-up into a casus belli in order to lie the nation into the wrong war and then fuck that war completely up.  As I wrote 11 years ago...

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration's bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra "9/11 changed everything" as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ -- as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement -- for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their hypocrisy...

7.  Using the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio, that Republican president can use the national crisis which his administration's incompetence and blood-lust brought about as a cudgel to beat their political opponents to their knees.

8. That Republican president can then fire any experts that gainsay his spectacularly bad strategy.

9.  Using the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio, that Republican president can use the national crisis which his administration's incompetence and blood-lust brought about to load up the counts with wingnut judges.

10.  Using the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio, that Republican president can use the national crisis which his administration's incompetence and blood-lust brought about to allow its cronies to loot the federal treasury.

10.  Using the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio, that Republican president can use the national crisis which his administration's incompetence and blood-lust brought about to put unqualified campaign donors and party hacks in charge of the vital work of rebuilding the country it had just destroyed.

11.  Using the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio, the Republican party was able to bring enough lies, fear and slander to bear on Bush's highly-qualified Democratic opponent to win re-election.

12.  Then everything started going to shit.  Katrina.  Teri Schiavo.  Abu Gharib,  And the stench from the Republican president's complete failure in Iraq and the farrago of lies he had used to foist this disaster onto a grieving nation could no longer be covered up, no matter how loudly the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio cranked up the volume, or no matter how urgently Peggy Noonan whispered that we should all just avert our eyes and move past it.

13.  Then the global economy collapsed.  And that's when the propaganda machinery of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio really kicked into gear.  With crackpot Conservative billionaire money footing the bill and Conservative media carrying the message live from coast-to-coast, suddenly the entire Republican Party up and disappeared like a fart in a cyclotron.

Overnight they were all "Tea Party Independents" who had never even heard of George W. Bush, but for some reason were filled to the fangs with a choking, venomous hatred of the Black guy which Democrats had elected to clean up eight years of Republican failure and ruin.

14.  There followed eight continuous years of lockstep Republican obstruction, Death Panels, Birtherism, slander and sedition, all bellowed through the increasingly unhinged megaphone of the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio as the GOP collectively raced deeper and deeper into madness.  All history prior to January 2009 was effectively erased and all of the Republican president's most loyal stooges and speechwriters were awarded permanent sinecures in the upper echelons of American mainstream journalism where they immediately pivoted from being hardcore Iraq War pimps and kickers-of-Liberals-in-the-teeth to hardcore Both Siderists for whom there was no act of Republican depravity so blatant and foul that it wasn't somehow the fault of the Extremes on Both Sides.

15.  And once their despicable pasts had been safely and permanently entombed, the "Tea Party Independents" were free to cast aside their stupid hats and clown makeup and re-emerged as the bone-deep Republican bigots and imbeciles they had always been.

16.  And thanks to all of the hard false-equivalency work the media Both Siderists had done to lower the bar far enough for Donald Trump to clear it, those same bone-deep Republican bigots and imbeciles nominated that lying, loutish, racist son-of-a-bitch, making it possible for yet another criminally incompetent Republican to lie and cheat his way to an electoral college victory while losing the popular vote.

And with that, bitter lessons of this entire era of continuous Republican disaster could not be clearer.

First, you can always rely on the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio to  Just.  Keep.  Lying.  All.  The.  Time.

Second, when the first lie fails, they will always be ready with a second and a third.

Third, when their previous lies start to catch up with them, just deny, deny, deny:

Fourth, when things go completely tits-up and the Republican Party finds itself trapped with no way to lie or deny its way out of it, do not lose heart.  Because the Murdoch Empire and Hate Radio will be right there to help them whitewash their past and escape the consequences of their despicable behavior.

And finally. remember, no matter how bad things get or how red-handed they are caught, Republicans can always rely on the legions of professional Both Siderists who have been salted throughout the mainstream media to invent some reason why some Liberal somewhere is to blame for half of it.

Here endeth the lesson.

No Half Measures