Amy Goodman is the host of this show, which can be seen and heard by going to the Democracy Now! website. Without fail, where the mainstream media fails to even attempt digging into a story, this show right here will make up the difference. What I like most is how useable the site is, so when I get into a certain story I can easily search and if sometime in the past an interview pertaining to it took place, I can always have the transcript and audio file downloaded to my PC within minutes.
I’ve read two of her books, which at least one of she co-wrote with her brother. I highly recommend both of them:
STATIC: GOVERNMENT LIARS, MEDIA CHEERLEADERS, AND THE PEOPLE WHO FIGHT BACK
What got me thinking about Democracy Now! lately, has been this stupified glop glop in the press on scandals and Constitution-shredding that is packaged as something new, when in fact it is anything but. I’ll post a clip tomorrow that will provide a perfect example, having to do with Donald Rumsfeld’s management philosophy. He’d shoot off 60 or so “snowflakes” around the Pentagon every day, basically mucking up the works, as these things wouldn’t even cover something actionable, but could represent more of what was going on inside the old bastard’s head on a given day. As if he were having a debate with himself over the ins and outs of defending a personal failure by spreading out the misery far and wide, and trying out his political swirms on the department as a whole.
I got aggrivated mostly because this story was actually covered in Bob Woodward’s ‘State of Denial’ over a year ago. Anyone could read that book and see Rumsfeld for what he is, the infighter with little competence to lean on when it came to managing the defense department. Though for me it’s the series of books that have come out since then, mostly relying on released documents and interviews with people who wouldn’t have spoken up sooner, which go much further than a couple of snowflakes telling us what we already knew.
Donald Rumsfeld is a war criminal. By the standard set by our own laws and certainly the standard set by international law, he should find himself on trial at some point. Piecing a belief like this one together is something that takes place over a stretch of time, with hundreds of thousands of words read, and once in a while the crucial interview with someone in the know on a show like Goodman’s Democracy Now! opens up a doorway. It is a crucial function of our fake democracy, these shows that really focus on finding out the truth. They are few and far between.