You're saying that Andrea Mitchell understood what he was saying because her response took into account everything that he said?

Mitchel is afraid of the consequences of what was said. That is why she is not following up. She should not have done the interview, if she was that afraid of the answers. Mitchel is obviously not a Murrow caliber reporter.

Andrea Mitchell is not a reporter, let along a Murrow caliber reporter. She gave up her integrity credentials long ago.

Any member of the press that has reached the height that mitchell has must have obeyed the general philosophical rules of the western press and intelligensia. It is a systematic problem which is revealed through just these types of interactions.

Anonymous has said that the only effective course of action is a brutal war, short of changing the policies that many in the Muslim world find so offensive. Mitchell didn't hear the part after 'short of', because those policies have become embedded in our sense of national identity. It's a sort of heresy (of the letting the terrorists win variety) to suggest that those policies can be altered. Anonymous himself seems to think that all out war is less of a cognitive stretch than policy change. They hate our freedom to control access to their oil.

This is very interesting and disturbing at the same time. Apparently Ms. Mitchell is so cognitively constricted she doesn't even consider possible what anonymous is saying. It is preconsiously filtered to the extent that she CAN NOT hear what he is saying without aggressively and applying her filters to translate what is being said into very restricted views. In other words she has become volitionally brain damaged. No cognitive dissonance either. The perfect Stepford reporter! I bet she has a string of Pulitzers! Fascinating.

I've labored over this phenomenon for a long time, and the questions eternally remain, "Is it willful ignorance, lack of conceptual powers or being a malevolent asswipe?" In the case of Mrs. Mitchell, I say it's a little of all three. Can she possibly be this stupid? Sure - but I don't believe she can't fucking hear words that are strung in basic grammatical patterns; therefore, it's willed ignorance when ignorance is needed. Are her conceptual powers out of whack? She's in the media, so I'd say...um, yeah. Is she a malovelent asswipe? That's beyond my purview, by it's so entirely possible that a grain of old-fashioned asswiperism is in her, I'll go there. I mean, there may be a SLIGHT amount of asswiper present.

But let's face this simple fact: when you're questioning the mechanisms of power, not merely power's lashing out, you are necessarily in very scary waters, as far as the media/average Americans are concerned. They both don't want to and can't go there. And that's the kind of low-IQ combination that's contributed to 900 soldiers and thousands of civilians killed in Iraq. It's Chomsky/Parenti/Goodman/Moore territory, and they don't like it one bit.

But I fucking love it.

I think for the most part you correctly interpret AM's response to Anon. as being, essentially, "That does not compute. Too much of a stretch for my tiny mind from what I believe already. Must lower the mental bulkheads. Ignore. Ignore."

Alternatively, what do we get if we take it at face value? Then it becomes: "Not support Israel? Not maintain bases in the Levant? But that's like everything America stands for! We can never change those things without ceasing to be who we are!"

While this would be extreme, I suspect her reaction actually contains some of both elements: identifying America integrally with its Mideast Policy, and getting brainfreeze at encountering an unfamiliar thought.

I went to the MSNBC interview. Very interesting. The CIA guy seems to be saying that if we don't deal with energy policy and Israel policy then we have to fight a vicious war against Islamic terrorists. And he is occupying this weird bureaucratic space where he acknowledges that our policies are crazy yet advocates for all out war in the absence of any sanity about those policies. It's like he is accepting the crazed political discourse and is just doing his job in advocating and implementing doomed tactics.

Andrea Mitchell has, in the past, been reprimanded and silenced for her investigations into the Carlyle Group. Perhaps she is now being cautious in her reporting. This may explain her response to Anon.

Patricia,

That's very interesting. Can you elaborate on it?

This is disturbing for many reasons. As far as the media idiocy angle, that, lamentably, is the rule and not the exception. What gets my gall is the fact that an anonymous man s getting a damn book deal! Where does that leave all of us who have names that we can actually use? I must know! Does this mean that, if I am just interesting enough that I can get published by telling them I cannot use my name? The mind fairly boggles at the implications! You would at least think that the man could hire a freaking ghost writer for God's sakes!
Thanks for the post; I'll go fume somewhere else now :)

"... leap across the table, grasp Mitchell's head in my hands, and scream, "ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF?"

Ah, I'd pay to see that. Actually, I'd pay just to know it happened, even if I couldn't see it myself.