I don't know how relevant Wired is these days to other people - after all, it's a website based on a magazine that saw its heyday amid dot-com bubble zeitgeist - but I still go there because it occasionally has interesting tidbits of information, even though the IQ of its pieces runs the gamut from actual journalism to a Michael Bay interpretation of Twitter. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be much supervision over its blog contributors, so at the moment there is an "article" titled Spec Ops Group Attacks Obama Over Leaks that uncritically regurgitates and promotes the transparent Swiftboating front group and its obviously Rove-scripted message. That would be disgusting enough on its own, but for some reason my comments criticizing the article are being blocked.
Try to stomach the innuendo and propaganda:
Does the voting public care about national security leaks? A group of special operations veterans opposed to President Obama hopes so.
In other words, if you care about national security, then you must consider this group and its message relevant and credible despite their obvious origins in the Romney campaign and Rove playbook. And if you don't consider them relevant or credible, then you don't care about national security.
A new political nonprofit, the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, seeks to be the 2012 edition of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (OPSEC is a military term meaning “operational security,” which in layman’s terms means “shut up about the mission.”) The ad it produced and circulated, embedded above, alleges that “Intelligence and Special Operations forces are furious and frustrated at how President Obama and those in positions of authority have exploited their service for political advantage,” owing to “countless leaks, interviews and decisions by the Obama administration and other government officials” that have “put future missions and personnel at risk.” The ad has racked up over 226,000 views on YouTube in a single day, and the group plans to air it in battleground states.
No discussion about the political context in which it occurs, and no mention of who is funding the group or how it came into existence - just stenography and boosterism plainly exhorting more people to add their views to the Youtube video. This steaming pile of Republican Pravda deigns to mention that the Obama campaign condemned the ad as Swiftboating, but immediately follows up by piling on criticism from libertarians that the administration is
too strict on leaks without once acknowledging that such criticism inherently calls the credibility of the group's message into question. Nope: Just covering every single angle from which Barack Obama can possibly be attacked.
Why is Spencer Ackerman using a tech blog as a forum for GOP agitprop? And who the fuck is this clown anyway? According to Wikipedia, he was an ardent supporter of the Iraq War until the messaging became inconvenient and unpopular, fired from The New Republic for "insubordination" in 2006, and now makes the rounds on the cable news circuit as a guest talking head. Does he think getting Mitt Romney into the White House and starting new wars will improve his career? Who at Wired monitors the crap that gets posted under its banner? It obviously goes beyond Ackerman himself, since comments critical of the article keep systematically disappearing, not to mention my own preemptive block from commenting under it (I haven't been blocked from commenting to other Wired articles).
But since the piece is evidently so transparent and fragile that the slightest criticism would be intolerable - that it can't sustain being seen on the same page with real, uncensored commentary on a site that isn't even supposed to be political in the first place - I'll add my response right here:
Gee, Spence, I didn't know Karl Rove was in Spec Ops. Maybe you could see your way to at least pretending you still comprehend the concept of truth, and write something that isn't so flimsily transparent, so pungently dishonest, and so mindfuckedly irrational that it can only continue to exist in a total political and intellectual vacuum.
And as for whoever manages content on the Wired website, my message is simple: I'm getting really tired of your website being a venue for these parasites. When I want to see shit like that, I go to websites that specialize in it - I don't need a helping of it served up second-hand on sites that are supposed to cover completely unrelated, if not utterly incompatible subjects. If you're under new management whose business plan calls for changing Wired content away from science and technology toward numerology, alien abductions, Creationism, faith healing, and fascism, by all means stay on this path. Turn your website into The History Channel, and regale the Freeper protozoans who can stomach what you serve with war porn and conspiracy theories involving Freemasonry. You're already well on the way indulging alternate-universe partisan propaganda like that promoted by Mr. Ackerman's corrupt toadying.