{"id":18899,"date":"2023-12-18T19:02:04","date_gmt":"2023-12-19T00:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=18899"},"modified":"2023-12-18T19:02:04","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T00:02:04","slug":"truth-is-the-biggest-threat-to-dc-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/18\/truth-is-the-biggest-threat-to-dc-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Truth is the Biggest Threat to DC \u2018Democracy\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Libertarian Institute, December 18, 2023<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Truth is the Biggest Threat to DC \u2018Democracy\u2019<\/a><\/h1>\n

by Jim Bovard<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In Washington, truth is reckoned as the greatest enemy of democracy. Hard facts are deadly threats to a president\u2019s prerogative to define reality and impose \u201cthe will of the people.\u201d<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Early this year, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member, was arrested and charged with transmission of national defense information among other charges. Teixeira allegedly leaked classified documents on the Ukraine war and other foreign policy issues to a Discord gaming group. The document propagated from there and appeared in many news articles in the following months.<\/p>\n

A hefty Washington Post<\/em> piece<\/a> last Wednesday vividly portrays U.S. government officials rushing to plug the hole in the dike before the leak swept away conventional wisdom lock, stock, and barrel. In a passage sure to boost sales of Kleenex inside the Beltway, the Post<\/em> quotes a U.S. government official who was permitted to remain anonymous: \u201cWe were blindsided and furious.\u201d<\/p>\n

The leaks vexed Team Biden because President Joe Biden had already proven\u2014via repeated statements\u2014that the war was going great, that Ukraine was on the verge of victory, and that pouring endless billions into Ukrainian government coffers was the only way to save freedom around the world.<\/p>\n

The Post<\/em>, which partnered with PBS for a television program on the Discord leaks, noted that the \u201ctop secret\u2026leaks predicted Ukraine\u2019s failure to make substantial gains in its counteroffensive\u2014a multibillion-dollar effort that cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. The bleak forecast provided a sharp contrast to Washington\u2019s optimistic messaging on the war, and it hurt Ukraine\u2019s relationship with its chief backer, the U.S. government.\u201d The \u201cbleak forecast\u201d was vastly more accurate than anything emitted by the Biden White House. A senior defense official (anonymous, of course) told the Post<\/em> that the Pentagon raced to determine \u201cwhat information may have been compromised.\u201d But the real challenge was determining which official lies had been debunked and what other documents might show up to obliterate White House talking points.<\/p>\n

The Post<\/em> bewailed how the leaks discomfited the Ukrainian government. T<\/strong>he Post<\/em> noted that \u201cthe leaks included never-before-released casualty estimates for Ukrainian forces, weaknesses in Ukraine\u2019s ability to service damaged armored vehicles and the country\u2019s shrinking supply of air defense munitions, which left population centers vulnerable to Russian cruise missile strikes and drones. Other documents warned that Ukraine was struggling to sustain troops, artillery and equipment\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The only reason that the \u201cleaks\u201d caused an international uproar is because U.S. government officials and their foreign partners had been brazenly lying about Ukrainian successes<\/strong> and prospects for victory. Folks who read foreign news sources or independent American outlets or websites (such as Antiwar.com and LibertarianInstitute.org) already knew that the war would likely have no happy ending for either Ukraine or Russia.<\/p>\n

The Post<\/em> omitted mentioning the role of federal censorship in deluding Americans about the Ukraine war<\/strong>. In July 2023, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that the FBI routinely colluded with Ukraine\u2019s spy agency which sought help to suppress social media accounts that criticized the Ukraine government or \u201cinaccurately reflects events in Ukraine\u201d (including accurate battlefield reports of Ukrainian military defeats). The House report revealed that the FBI \u201croutinely relayed these lists [of accounts] to the relevant social media platforms\u201d and sought their suppression. The House report noted that \u201cauthentic accounts of Americans, including a verified U.S. State Department account and those belonging to American journalists, were ensnared in the censorship effort and flagged for social media companies to take down.\u201d The CIA also pressured Twitter, calling for the suppression of \u201clong lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of \u2018anti-Ukraine narratives,\u201d journalist Matt Taibbi reported.<\/p>\n

Washington Post<\/em> readers are the cream of the intellectual crop, at least according to Washington Post<\/em> readers.<\/strong> So how did Post devotees respond to the indignation about the leaker?<\/p>\n

The article generated almost 600 comments. Among the most liked was an outburst from \u201cArtPope\u201d: \u201dDon\u2019t understand why this article was written other than to support the pro-Putin, anti-Ukrainian position of the white nationalist evangelical fascist <\/span><\/a>RepubliQans.\u201d \u201cThinking4\u2033 replied: \u201cThey have profound ignorance of democracy and that their very words and actions undermine the standing of the US in the world.\u201d (Thinking4 was probably not an English major.)<\/p>\n

None of the most liked comments showed any outrage about Team Biden\u2019s perennial lies on Ukraine. Instead, raw hatred was popular: \u201cFind these traitors.<\/span> Put their butts in jail. 10 years minimum. No deals.\u201d \u201cMake it 30,\u201d came a quick reply, and another person piled on: \u201cIn solitary.\u201d Said another: \u201cThroughout history, the traditional punishment for treason is hanging. I\u2019m ok with that.\u201d \u201cMario TRUTH\u201d joined the lynch mob: \u201cWhat Teixeira did was nothing short of America WORST traitor it has ever seen. He not only aided in murdering 1000\u2019s of innocent people, he intruded in Ukrainian leaders planning of <\/span><\/a>a counteroffensive that would have saved many of the 1000\u2019s Teixeira killed.\u201d Ukrainian casualties have been high in part because the Pentagon pressured the Ukrainian military to engage in frontal assaults on heavily-fortified Russian positions.<\/p>\n

So U.S. government officials are entitled to blindfold and deceive the American people to avoid \u201cintruding\u201d on foreign leaders planning a military attack? This theory of democracy gets curiouser and curiouser.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Post<\/em> noted that the Discord leaks \u201cdepicted Zelensky in a new light, revealing his apparent interest in occupying Russian border villages and obtaining long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russian territory\u2014an assertion that Ukrainians deny and would have deeply angered Washington.\u201d So America\u2019s favored foreign leader was conniving to pull the United States into World War III? Maybe Biden should have asked if Americans supported such recklessness? No, he was president so he was entitled to delude Americans and pretend to rule the world.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the greatest intellectual calisthenics in the long article was the paragraph that exonerated all Biden administration falsehoods on Ukraine<\/strong>. The Post<\/em> offered a finger-wagging explanation:<\/p>\n

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\u201cRather than exposing willful deceit by a U.S. government eager to bury bad news, the Discord leaks revealed a sharp divide between the U.S. intelligence analysts who authored the documents and many senior officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department who were overly sanguine about Ukraine\u2019s prospects for success.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Do the Post<\/em> reporters and editors have no shame? They were not smart (or honest) enough to hark back to one of the clearest lessons from the Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971. As philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, during the Vietnam War, \u201cthe policy of lying <\/span><\/a>was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.\u201d CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But, \u201cin the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public,\u201d Arendt commented. The Post<\/em> rationalized the bias of Team Biden: \u201cU.S. officials viewed the airing of pessimistic battle outcomes as detrimental to their endeavor to raise support for the war effort, both in Congress and internationally.\u201d Were officials entitled to utter any falsehood that resulted in higher congressional appropriations to bankroll more bombs and missiles<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

<\/b>Biden, his appointees, and plenty of former military officials on the gravy train have perpetually brazenly misrepresented the war.<\/strong> The result is that the Ukrainian government is on the verge of conscripting Ukrainian grandfathers to send on daily, suicidal Pickett\u2019s Charges so that Ukrainian politicians can keep pocketing billions of dollars in U.S. handouts. Ukraine prohibited any males between the age of 18 to 60<\/span><\/a> from leaving the country\u2014as if the government had a preemptive right to send them to their death. Ukraine is closing its western border to \u201cmilitary age males\u201d the same way that East Germany closed its border to West Europe decades ago. But, unlike the perfidious East Germans, Ukraine\u2019s leaders are taking practically all the nation\u2019s adult males hostage in the name of freedom.<\/p>\n

But it remains a \u201cno cost\u201d war inside the Washington Beltway, where Ukrainian flags quickly replaced BLM banners after the Russian invasion.<\/strong> Nothing has changed for the policy class in the last 60 years. Arendt castigated the lavishly-paid intellectual cheerleaders for the Vietnam War who ignored \u201cthe untold misery that their \u2018solutions,\u2019 pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and anti-personnel bullets, held in store.\u201d In the subsequent decades, there has never been a shortage of weasel intellectuals to sell out peace in return for lavish payoffs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Will The Washington Post<\/em> ever honestly examine the costs of its own kowtowing to officialdom?<\/strong> The Post<\/em> could do a great in-depth investigation of why its own editorial page and columnists have made so many false, misleading, or deranged statements on the Ukraine war. But don\u2019t expect hell to freeze over any time soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Libertarian Institute, December 18, 2023 Truth is the Biggest Threat to DC \u2018Democracy\u2019 by Jim Bovard In Washington, truth is reckoned as the greatest enemy of democracy. Hard facts are deadly threats to a president\u2019s prerogative to define reality and impose \u201cthe will of the people.\u201d Early this year, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2124,52,1395,264,1107,833],"class_list":["post-18899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biden","tag-democracy","tag-kowtowing","tag-lies","tag-ukraine","tag-washington-post"],"yoast_head":"\nTruth is the Biggest Threat to DC \u2018Democracy\u2019 - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Washington Post portrays leaks on Ukraine war as dire threat to democracy - but the official lies were no problem.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/18\/truth-is-the-biggest-threat-to-dc-democracy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Truth is the Biggest Threat to DC \u2018Democracy\u2019 - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18899"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18901,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18899\/revisions\/18901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}