Is Rupert Murdoch a Terrorist? October 21, 2006

Is Rubert Murdoch a moral terrorist? Or just a guy who likes to make a lot of money, damned if he cares how?

With Fox News currently pandering to the current Republican Fear Campaign (the RFC), it’s time to dig deeper into the pathology of Republican hypocrisy.

The maze is a difficult one to follow, so get yourself some green tea (or some scotch), and get ready to try to follow the amazing thought process that is prevalent in the land of the GOP.

To do this, we don’t need the Mark Foleys of the world, and we never have.

All we have to do is look at Murdoch’s media empire.

from http://www.page3.com/girl/katie_harte/main_image/2009_5_30_katie_harte_1_347x509.jpg -- this is a copyrighted image from Rupert's media empire

And, then, somehow, make a connection to “family values.” The largess of Republican hypocrisy, we’ll find, is matched only by their corruption.

Murdoch’s family values, like Foley’s, tend to gravitate towards skin. Let’s have a look at one of his first successful media ventures, London’s daily tabloid, The Sun.

As you can imagine, sex sells, and Murdoch found that out early. The Sun’s Page 3 girl became famous, especially after 16 year old girls started strutting their stuff before Murdoch’s eager lenses (note that this was legal in Britain until 2003).

Now, I don’t consider myself a prude. In fact, I’ll just be honest and tell you that when I bought Playboys while attempting to stumble into adulthood, I did not buy them for the articles.

But Playboy is published by Hugh Hefner, who is not exactly a major GOP funding force.

So here we have Republicans consistently stitching up victory after victory in the Bible Belt, extolling family values as a key part of their platform (when they’re not begging underage pages for pix), while at the same time, the mouthpiece of the GOP in America (Murdoch owns Fox News, too) has been titillating weak-kneed Brits for more than three decades.

Meanwhile, according to this Wiki site, The Parents Television Council named the Murdoch-owned Fox Network “the worst network to watch with your children”, describing many of the shows as “100% immoral.”

Moral values. 100% immoral. Interesting juxtaposition supporters of the GOP moral crusade face. Problem is, they’ve been facing it for years, and have been pulling the electoral switch for the GOP, anyway, without as much as blinking.

And now we’ve got MySpace.

For a brief sample of ribald MySpace pictures that our friends in the Red should really love (you may want to cross yourselves, first, before looking, if you’re a Red just getting out of church), all you need to do is browse the site for a few minutes. There, our friends from the Red will find much more than an attitude. In fact, there’s not much you won’t find.

But hey, I’m not here to rail against public morality or its evil twin, public immorality. I could actually care less what people watch in the privacy of their homes.

What I do care about is when other people tell me what I should and should not do.

Especially when those same people’s propaganda machine is pushing the masses to actually do the opposite of what these people are saying we should do.

It’s a form of terrorism because the effect of the bipolar messages are actually a major cause for the current toxicity dominating political discourse. On one hand, you’ve got the Murdoch media machine blasting away at (mostly) our youth with titillation and the notion that all you need in life is fun, fun, fun. On the other hand, you’ve got a Red State mentality from voters who, before the Crusades begun by the Moral Majority, typically voted Democratic, but are now buying the propaganda from the other half of the Murdoch media machine, Fox News.

As the frustration in liberal circles has grown with the hypocrisy, along with their own inability to break through to Red State voters in a way that truly resonates, they’ve become more vitriolic in their lambasting of Republican hides, and the Republicans, always in attack mode anyway, have responded in kind.

In a sense, in its most savage form, terrorism is all about trying to drive a wedge between two groups within the same nation who normally have more to gain from unity than from disunity, more to gain from harmony than discord. Healthy disagreement is always good for the democratic process, but terrorists sew discontent between groups. That’s their master plan.

How better to drive such a wedge than to drive the citizens crazy with mixed messages. “Look at this, wouldn’t you like a piece of it? Can’t have it. You’re wrong to think that you can.” It’s like showing a small child a nice, sparkly bit of candy, and then when she reaches it for it, you kick her in the teeth. That kind of thing makes people mad. Or at least it should.

As the congressional elections approach, the results are not in the hands of pundits or talking heads. It’s in the hands of Mary Joe Pinupski, deep in Kentucky, who needs to ask herself why she keeps voting for people who torture her teenage boys with titillating pix, and plan for a war where he has a very good chance of dying. Mary Joe, in other words, needs to ask herself if she wants to get kicked in the teeth.