You say you want a revolution

Today at noon East Coast time, a yawn-stifling 9 a.m. here on the West Coast, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and filmmaker Robert Greenwald are holding a press conference decrying what they perceive as the Fox News Channel’s ongoing efforts to lead a propaganda campaign to convince us to attack Iran with the same rudderless zeal with which we attacked Iraq.

Of course, some will argue that Greenwald – producer of the films “Uncovered: The War on Iraq,” “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” and “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers” is a propagandist himself. Fair enough, but “propaganda” doesn’t necessarily mean lying, and Greenwald at least puts himself in the general neighborhood of facts, something the Fox folks can’t be bothered with when it’s just so much more fun to try to scare people silly, as this video, comparing Fox News Channel rhetoric in the run-up to the war with Iraq with its current blathering, suggests.

Murdoch, Fox News uberlord (and new Wall Street Journal owner), even admitted he tried to prod America into war with Iraq.

More copious Fox drum-beating can be found here.

Whether or not one believes Fox is ratcheting up the hysteria or whether there are enough Kool-Aid addicts for the network to sway opinion in a substantive fashion these days, the chief question is: Just who the heck’s going to fight Iran, anyway? With our military strained to breaking and being forced into tours of duty months longer than any reasonable human could withstand and with the suicide rate within the military jumping shockingly last year, we’re closer to that TV commercial’s bravado about “An Army of One” than we’d like to think.

Of course, some wingnuts are perfectly happy to advocate nuking the Middle East, then having Americans move into those Arab-eradicated territories (radiation levels be damned), then having President Bush instate himself as “President-for-Life.” And when other neo-cons aren’t certain whether such a proposal is a joke or a menace or a good idea, that red-pill-or-blue-pill conundrum from “The Matrix” isn’t feeling so much like science-fiction anymore.