'Beyond Satire:' Hillary Hearts Al-Jazeera

For Hillary Clinton, run-of-the-mill Republicans are a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. But Al-Jazeera? That’s some quality television:

“Our private media, particularly cultural programming often works at counter purposes to what we truly are as Americans. I remember having an Afghan general tell me that the only thing he thought about Americans is that all the men wrestled and the women walked around in bikinis because the only TV he ever saw was Baywatch and World Wide Wrestling.”Meanwhile she says Al-Jazeera, CCTV and Russia Today are killing it: “Al Jazeera is winning. The Chinese have opened up a global English language and multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English language network. I’ve seen it in a couple of countries and it’s quite instructive.”

Hey, leading foreign policy and demolition expert Rosie O’Donnell told you four years ago (on a show created and co-hosted by ABC’s longest-serving and most prominent newswoman, appropriately enough) that you need to go outside of the US to get the straight dope:

I’m saying that in America we are fed propaganda and if you want to know what’s happening in the world go outside of the U.S. media because it’s owned by four corporations one of them is this one. And you know what, go outside of the country to find out what’s going on in our country because it’s frightening. It’s frightening.

Gee, after Van Jones’ trutherism, Hillary is now the second Obama official to follow the path that Rosie bravely tread in the twilight days of the Bush administration. So she’s got that going for at least. Or as Barry Rubin writes, “Hillary Clinton Promoting Al Jazeera: It’s Beyond Satire!”

Things have gone beyond anything I ever would have believed. With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton holding up al-Jazira as a role model for the American media, I think I’ve seen just about everything wrong being said and done. Is she aware of how al-Jazira slants the news? I still remember their reporting that the United States had used a nuclear weapon in Baghdad during the 2003 war.

Does she have any idea what goes on in the discussion shows, where a radical faces off against a moderate, the host sides with the radical, all the telephone callers side with the radical, and some make death threats against the moderate? When al-Jazira began it was staffed by radical Arab nationalists. At a certain point several years ago, as Qatar moved closer to Tehran, they were almost all replaced by Islamists.

In the “good old days” must of the American intellectual and sometimes governmental establishment sided with the Arab nationalists–including Yasir Arafat–against Israel. I at least could understand that. But now we see many of these people siding with revolutionary Islamists against both Israel and the Arab nationalists!

Remember early in 2008 when Hillary (or at least her voice-over announcer) assured us that she had what it took when the phone rang at 3:00 AM, presumably with an advisor on the other end of the blower telling her that a Middle East-related crisis was reaching critical mass? Remember a few months later when some on the right felt a bit sorry for Hillary losing to Obama in the primaries? That she would have been the more mature of the two Democratic candidates had she won in November? Well, so much for that idea; her radical chic take on Al Jazeera sounds remarkably simpatico to Obama’s own foreign policy worldview.

Or is Hillary freelancing, and this latest gaffe should not be considered an official part of the Obama Doctrine and its laser-like geopolitical focus?

(Via Michael Ledeen at the Tatler.)