• by Tom Siebert , Op-Ed Contributor, November 3, 2006

It's less than a week before the climax of the most expensive campaign season in the history of civilization and all the mainstream news media can talk about is...John Kerry.

That's right. Even the Pentagon realizes the Iraqi War is veering toward total chaos, the voting process may be hacked beyond repair by computerized polls that don't provide a paper trail and the White House continues to censor scientists about global warming. Still, the past 48 hours of the news cycle have been devoted to discussions about a politician who isn't even running for office.

Forget whether the anti-charismatic John Kerry is a Skull & Bones blueblood tool or just another culturally tone-deaf, arrogantly entrenched member of America's self-proclaimed political royalty. The bizarre spiral of events over the past few days is worth examining because it illuminates how the members of the right wing media noise machine--let's call them the GOPuppets--drive mainstream news nowadays.

Last week, I mentioned the professional/partisan divide. It's always easier for partisans to command the public mindshare because professionals feel compelled to tell both sides of the story to reach the truth.

The partisan-professional divide is why the GOPuppets that make up the right-wing circle jerkof Fox News/The Drudge Report/New York Post/Rush Limbaugh, et. al., now drive the news cycle. And everybody else follows them. If Drudge manufactures something salacious, the others merrily pile on. Whether it's true or not, at some point, the rest of the news business joins in. It isn't always guaranteed to work, but it often does--spectacularly--in the age of 24/7 news coverage.

We've seen it again and again over the past couple of weeks. Michael J. Fox's political commercial. That story took off when Limbaugh criticized him, in an attempt to turn the debate, which, in turn, turned on him. Virginia Senatorial candidate Jim Webb's explicit novels--the George Allen campaign had been shopping that story to the media for months--but until Drudge "broke" it, nobody wrote about it. Once it was out there, Fox News and the New York Post immediate began humping it like a rabid dog. It commanded the news cycle for almost three full days.

That's not counting how the GOPuppets provided an easy soapbox for defense of the controversial television commercial attacking Tennessee candidate Harold Ford, which exploited some of the most primitive racist sexual fears.

Of course, even the maestros of misinformation couldn't spin any of those stories to their favor. Ultimately. The "Kerry Klamity" (as the New York Daily News bannered Wednesday), was a slam dunk.

Eureka! The GOPuppets found an effective punching bag to turn the news cycle their way. As of noon Thursday afternoon, the botched joke/insult to the troops made the failed presidential candidate the No. 1 (John Kerry) and No. 5 (Kerry) top searches on the Internet, according to Technorati.

Finally, one of the key continuing narratives from the GOPuppets is that Democrats can't lead. This misinformation mantra is why the American public has heard very little about what the Democrats will do if they win the House (or, almost inconceivably, all of Congress) next Tuesday.

One month prior to Election Day, the much-vilified Democratic probable Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi released a short list of six concrete, actionable measures that Democrats would try to enact within the first 100 hours of their takeover. It even had a simple, catchy, marketable name: "Six for '06."

The six points sound like focus-group tested no-brainers: Create new rules to break the link between lobbyists and legislation; enact all recommendations of the 9/11 Commission; raise the minimum wage; halve student loan interest rates; expand federally funded stem-cell research; allow the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for Medicare patients' drugs.

Why do I mention these points? Because there's been little reported about it in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNN, Fox News. The Times finally got around to mentioning it Monday, at the end of a puffy Pelosi personality profile. USA Today did something similar, three weeks after Pelosi's original announcement.

The GOPuppets on The Wall Street Journal editorial page even mock Pelosi for not having a plan, contrasting her with Newt Gingrich and the "Contract With America." To their mild credit, the more ethical and honest real reporters at the WSJ did manage to make passing mention of a few of the six points, albeit buried deep in two hard news stories.

The Washington Post, in an article that appeared three weeks after Pelosi's pronouncement, even noted how little attention had been paid to her points--though that same article failed to mention a previous WP story that ripped Pelosi's political naiveté. Hey, maybe she is naïve. Maybe this is just warmed-over rhetoric that rips off the Republicans. But Contract with America got attention. Doesn't Pelosi's "Six for '06" deserve the same?

Camp Falcon: Last week, I wrote about the attack on Camp Falcon, one of the largest ammunition dumps just outside Baghdad, where a number of American troops were stationed. I was subsequently contacted by several people who pointed me to several new sources of information about the attack, as well as saying that one newslink about the attack that I suspected as propaganda, a site called "Jihad Unspun," was just that. One source, though, insists it's a CIA-created site for reverse propaganda.

Who knows? It's totally down the rabbit hole with Alice when it comes to such matters. The one thing I can tell you is that the mainstream media continues to ignore what YouTube shows to be a series of massive and long-lasting explosions. The only other (semi-) reputable place I can steer you is Wonkette, which adds even more unsettling facts to the story.