tdaxp

"A Battle Over Programming at National Public Radio," by Stephen Labaton, New York Times, 16 May 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/business/media/16radio.html? (from Liberals Against Terrorism).

The Administration's new appointee to the Federal Government-influenced Corporation for Public Broadcasting is trying to move programming away from news and commentary and toward music. This is important because it morally Isolates liberals and Reorients an influential portion of American media [PISRR].

• Morally Isolating liberals is an important goal in the Conservative program. This serves many purposes.
  
  • It breaks apart the ideological networks that support liberal 4th Generation Political attacks on the Conservative movement.
    
  • It makes it harder for those networks to spread, by "removing preachers from pulpits."
    
  • And it also messes with liberal OODA [Observe-Orient-Decide-Act] loops.
    
    To quote John Robb
    
    

    Grand strategy, according to Boyd, is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat.

    
    
    This is the insanity which makes liberals personally attack their own leaders and other wonderful things for us.



• Likewise, Reharmonizing National Public Radio. Turning NPR from a high-brow liberal to high-brow conservative vehicle would be a coup. But it is too difficult to do in one swoop. It must be done in stages. This is the first part of a serious attempt to take away NPR's liberal voice. If Conservatives are able to hold the executive, expect news to come back later -- with "balance."

It is fascinating to see an Isolation-Reharmonization PISRR attack that leaves out the middle stage -- subversion. It is even more fascinating to watch President Bush, a natural fourth-generation politician, make his mark.

Update: Praktike does see a Subversion angle.

"The Pentagon's New Map," interview of Thomas P.M. Barnett by Steve Inskeep, Morning Edition, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4456685, 18 January 2005.

Dr. Barnett is a former researcher at the Naval War College, and joined NPR morning edition to talk about his book, The Pentagon's New Map. Some excerpts:

On Rumsfeld famous quote on Iraq

Rumsfeld's answer was sometimes you go to war with the army that you have, not the one that you want. Not exactly. You go to war with the army that you've been wanting.

On the People's Republic and oil

The second question is really the question of rising China. We have to look at them much like the British looked at the United States in the first several decades of the twentieth century. We have to see them as a rising power to be co-opted, not confronted. Because I think if you look at their strategic interests and you look at our strategic interests the overlap there is absolutely tremendous. Its Asia whose energy requirements are going to double in the next twenty years. So in many ways our quest for a more stable connected Middle East serves the interests of a rising China far more in a direct sense than it does the United States.

On Iran

I think there are ways to co-copt Iran because I think strategically in the region we have a lot of similar interests if we look at the situation with more objective eyes.

There's a lot more for a seven-minute interview. Give is a listen.