Rachel Maddow Defends Western Warmongering in Libya

Rachel Maddow, defender of "friendly" western aggression

By David Walsh

On March 21, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow offered a defense of the Obama administration and its role in launching a military assault on Libya. With tortured logic, Maddow attempted to show that the means by which President Barack Obama made public this new act of Great Power aggression revealed the chasm that separates his administration from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

The arguments offered by the MSNBC news program host, a principal voice of the American liberal-left in the mainstream media, are absurd and unworthy, but it is unlikely anyone in and around her circle will object. This social layer is fully committed to the Obama administration and, moreover, to the defense of American imperial interests, with which it identifies, in the final analysis, its own material comfort and peace of mind. This helps explain the collapse of the official anti-war movement in the US since the 2008 election.

Maddow began her program Monday in a typically flippant manner. “In the United States of America, we are used to thinking of ourselves as a superpower, as a world leader, as a country capable of throwing our weight around when we feel the need to. … We go to war all the time—big wars, little wars, medium-sized wars, weird wars, normal wars, wars. America as a country fights a lot of wars.”

Maddow’s cynical tone hints at criticism and a vaguely anti-establishment, even anti-war stance, while actually committing her to no position or analysis whatsoever. Why does the US government go to war so frequently? What has been the character of those wars? What is her attitude toward those conflicts? About that, nothing …

After showing clips of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and the most recent Bush announcing military actions from the White House (against Grenada, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, and Iraq once more), Maddow told her viewers, “Now that the United States has embarked on its latest new military intervention in Libya, I would love to be able to show you the current president’s Oval Office address on the subject, but there isn’t one.”

Maddow noted that Obama made his public statement about the latest US military action while in Brazil. She continued, “President Obama announced his own military intervention, but he pointedly declined the opportunity to do it in a way that US presidents usually do.” The current administration’s decision, the news program host explained, “to forego the chest-thumping commander-in-chief theater that goes with military intervention of any kind, that in itself is a fascinating and rather blunt demonstration of just how much this presidency is not like that of George W. Bush.”

In other words, Maddow treats Obama’s anti-democratic and unconstitutional act of declaring war behind the backs of Congress and the American people as a positive good.

From there, Maddow presented clips of past presidents, while running for office, posturing as humble, ‘peace’ candidates. She went on, “A candidate named Barack Obama promised that. The difference with Mr. Obama as president is that he appears to be walking more of that walk as well as talking that talk.”

But Obama has launched a military assault against a virtually defenseless country (and, of course, escalated the war in Afghanistan to unprecedented levels, while maintaining 50,000 US troops in Iraq). How is that different from Bush, who also launched such attacks?

Because Obama has gone about it differently, making no Oval Office address, “repeatedly stressing the limited nature of US involvement, promising there will be no ground troops, no matter what” (Maddow), bringing in European allies and various Arab regimes, etc. Obama’s empty phrase that the bulk of US involvement in the Libyan operation would last “A Matter of Days, Not a Matter of Weeks” appeared on the screen throughout the first portion of her program.

Maddow’s defense of Obama’s new war in Libya, which will result in the deaths of thousands and risks unleashing far wider and bloodier conflagrations, sheds light on her and the American liberal-left more generally. There is nothing remotely “progressive” about these people.

Rachel Maddow Supports Neo-Colonial War Against the Afgahn People

 Maddow makes trip to Afghanistan

By David Walsh

The visit by MSNBC news program host Rachel Maddow to Afghanistan in early July was as revealing as it was repugnant.

Maddow is a principal voice of the liberal-left in the American media mainstream. When her program first aired in September 2008, the press made much of the fact that the she was the first “openly gay anchor” to host a prime-time news program in the US.

Maddow interviewed American officers and soldiers, touring Kandahar and Kabul, discussing counter-insurgency strategy and the overall state of the US military occupation.

Whatever misgivings she might have about the ultimate fate of the American and allied effort in Afghanistan, Maddow expressed complete solidarity with the occupation and the US military, endorsing the bloody suppression of the insurgency.

Who is Rachel Maddow? The daughter of a former US Air Force captain and raised in Castro Valley, California, Maddow attended Stanford University.

Later she won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford. She was apparently the first “openly gay American” to receive a Rhodes Scholarship.

After some years in radio, Maddow became a regular panelist on MSNBC’s “Tucker,” hosted by Tucker Carlson. She was also a frequent guest on “Paula Zahn Now” on CNN.

In January 2008, she won a position as political analyst on MSNBC, and in April 2008, substituted for Keith Olbermann on his “Countdown” program. She got her own show on MSNBC later that year.

Maddow is articulate and more quick-witted than most of her counterparts on television. Any favorable impression those qualities make is more than compensated for by her immense self-satisfaction and insipid, timid social commentary.

Maddow labels herself as a “national security liberal.” Intending to be ironic, she explains, “I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”

The New York Times terms her a “defense policy wonk,” who is writing a book on the role of the military in postwar American politics.

As her coverage of Afghanistan reveals, Maddow is a supporter of the American military and its operations around the world. She worries, like many left-liberals, that the Afghan war is not going well and that it may be unwinnable.

But what if it were winnable? Maddow, like the editors of the Nation (that magazine’s Washington editor, Chris Hayes, sat in for the host while she was traveling abroad), opposes the immediate withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The war in Afghanistan is not only an assault on the Afghan people, it is part of the conspiracy against the American population.

Its prosecution is bound up with wholesale attacks on democratic rights, the defense of privilege and wealth, and the ongoing attack on jobs and living standards in the US.

Maddow is part of the upper-middle-class liberal left. She is a product of a period in which questions of personal identity, at the expense of social class, emerged as the major component of the American liberal outlook and the orientation of the Democratic Party.

The striving for privileges by sections of the African-American and Latino petty-bourgeoisie, the elevation of gender and sexuality to world-historical importance—these are what formed Maddow. As a result, she is quite indifferent to the conditions of the working population.

One can prove the point concretely. Taking her program’s transcripts over the course of three weeks in May 2010 (May 10-28), one searches in vain for a single reference to “joblessness” or “the jobless,” or to “unemployment.”

During the month there was widespread discussion in the media of the record levels of long-term unemployment in the US.

Nor does the phrase “social inequality” appear, or “inequality” by itself. The word “poverty” comes up once, but in relation to Mexico, and not uttered by Maddow.

In what sense then can Maddow be designated “left” or “progressive’?

It is enough for the Nation (whose effusive July 28, 2008 piece reported, “Love is too weak a word to describe how some people feel about Rachel Maddow”), or the New York Times, that she is gay. Just as Barack Obama’s ethnicity was enough to earn their support.

The world doesn’t function that way. The determinant division is not ethnicity, race or gender, but social class. By her support for a brutal, neo-colonial war, Rachel Maddow has identified herself in the most indelible fashion.