Rachel Maddow, JFK, and Easy Money

[Jim DiEugenio]

I wrote this after someone tipped me off about how bad this was.

He was right. How lazy and smartass can you be? It was a disgrace. Who cares how Ruby got into the basement, I want to hear about Tom Pettet. Even when Tom does not know what the heck he is talking about. The ARRB was a bust? How many documents did she read?

Pitiful.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kenne...easy-money

[Lauren Johnson]

I wrote this after someone tipped me off about how bad this was.

He was right. How lazy and smartass can you be? It was a disgrace. Who cares how Ruby got into the basement, I want to hear about Tom Pettet. Even when Tom does not know what the heck he is talking about. The ARRB was a bust? How many documents did she read?

Pitiful.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kenne...easy-money

She fits the profile of what has been termed: a deep state "lifetime actor." Lifetime actors are intelligence assets used to specify acceptable opinion defined by their "authoritative" position. I see William F. Buckley Jr, Noam Chomsky, and the Clintons as prominent candidates.

[Jim DiEugenio]

How can anyone that smart act that dumb.

You might be right.

[Anthony Thorne]

She 'wrote' a book - DRIFT - which from the title onwards was meant to push the narrative that the military-industrial complex was well-intentioned but had somehow become misdirected from its original noble goals. It was essentially the book length version of the apologia the Bush administration used for their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan - i.e, "Whoops!"

RT Journalist Abby Martin tore into Maddow over her coverage of 9/11. You can pretty much transplant the tactics Maddow used here to her antics on JFK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAEwB40CRLo&t=288s

[Jim DiEugenio]

I guess I was late to the party.

This woman has been a shill for the establishment for a long time.

[Joseph McBride]

How can anyone that smart act that dumb.

You might be right.

Penn Jones made a similar observation about the
media, wondering how so many smart people
could be so dumb. He was of course being deeply
sarcastic and cutting about their disingenuousness
and corruption. The question about Rachel Maddow
left unanswered here is whether she is actually
that dumb or just pretending to be so. She went
to Stanford, which doesn't necessarily prove anything one
way or another (even JFK went there briefly, but
that was a long time ago, and it's a rather conservative, business-oriented place
nowadays; Tom Wolfe's sharp college satire I AM CHARLOTTE
SIMMONS is based on Stanford and Duke, Nixon's alma mater). Maddow could read books other than
the ones she apparently reads for (dis)information.
She might start with Sylvia Meagher's ACCESSORIES
AFTER THE FACT. I defy anyone who reads that
book with an open mind to come away supporting
the Warren Report and not realizing there is "something
wrong in the land," as Penn out it.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Joe:

What I meant was this. Maddow not only went to Stanford, she also got a Ph D from Oxford, which is usually considered the best university in the world. She was also a Rhodes Scholar.

No doubt she is pretty bright.

I prefaced my final remark with a statement you should appreciate. It was from film director Martin Ritt about Richard Burton, which I hope you did not miss. Because most people, including me, think Burton wasted his talent, maybe even worse than Brando.

My very last statement parallels the old adage by Upton Sinclair: its hard to get a journalist to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

Meaning Maddow likes the big money she is making now, and appreciates it a lot more than what she was getting back there in Northampton.

[Anthony Thorne]

I think Maddow is useful to certain obvious groups as she can hold her own in a conversation when interviewing various folk, and she looks and acts like the rest of the TV talking heads, so she can pop up on Bill Maher and the like.

For her TV show, though, I gather she just recites whatever they chuck up on her teleprompter, with varying degrees of smugness. Guests like Shenon can come on to reinforce whatever junk they've told her to believe.

At this point, I don't expect any figure at her level on a national news/media show to report any real news, particularly on subjects that are of interest to us. It'd all going to be propaganda.

[Lauren Johnson]

I think Maddow is useful to certain obvious groups as she can hold her own in a conversation when interviewing various folk, and she looks and acts like the rest of the TV talking heads, so she can pop up on Bill Maher and the like.

For her TV show, though, I gather she just recites whatever they chuck up on her teleprompter, with varying degrees of smugness. Guests like Shenon can come on to reinforce whatever junk they've told her to believe.

At this point, I don't expect any figure at her level on a national news/media show to report any real news, particularly on subjects that are of interest to us. It'd all going to be propaganda.

William Jefferson Clinton was a Rhodes scholar as well, which was when he was recruited for his lifetime job. Coincidence?

[Joseph McBride]

Richard Burton's diaries are worth reading. He was an intelligent man who despised the trappings of stardom and what it and big money had done to him and he had little respect for or interest in acting. His main passion in life was reading. And screwing Liz was number two. He used acting to buy quiet time to read. But his lifestyle consumed him and ate him up along with his heavy drinking and depression. I don't think he ever was a great actor like Brando. I saw Burton twice, once in a bookstore at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (he looked surprisingly small and gaunt) and once while he was shooting the scene of a young Latina being exorcised and going up in flames in EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, a great film. The shooting of that scene with the fire effects was very tense. My admiration for THE HERETIC is a minority position; I have counted nine other people who like it. It's a film with profound spiritual themes and one of the few surrealistic films ever made in Hollywood. John Boorman told me he made it to attack the original EXORCIST, which he thought exploited and glorified child abuse (I loathe it for that reason as well). Boorman said Max Von Sydow shared that view, and so he had to talk Max into making the sequel by promising that they would attack the original. That violates the first rule of sequels, which is to more or less replicate the audience's experiences with the first film.