By Kevin McCullough
Sunday, February 09, 2014
The entire world saw it happen. The entire world minus
Vladimir Putin that is.
His television feed showed something different than what
actually happened on the first night at this week's Winter Olympic's opening
ceremonies.
If you missed it, the producers had designed five
floating snowflakes that were intended to first open into independent rings and
then merge into the five rings composing the Olympic signature logo. It was
designed to work properly. In rehearsal it did work properly. The producers
video-taped the rehearsal just so that they would be able to review the program
and make the final adjustments.
Turns out that footage proved helpful.
In the actual opening ceremonies, NBC beamed the actual
happenings, to the watching global audience. The top right
ring--ironically--normally colored red (the color synonymous in Russia's
history with tight-fisted dictatorial control)--failed to open. The snowflake
remained a snowflake and Russia was embarrassed on the global television stage.
Vladimir Putin, however, had a different screen showing
him a fully formed Olympic sign with the footage being fed from the rehearsal
footage to his private suite.
In the age of modern media, it wasn't even 24 hours
before we knew that Putin had been snowed. And the producers have since
confessed to sending the rehearsal footage to the Russian feed the second they
realized the malfunction was occurring in the Olympic stadium.
The obvious questions come to mind, "Why did they
send the altered feed to Putin's suite? Why did they fear Putin would see the
actual truth? And what did they fear would happen if he did?"
The idea in the modern era, that members of a state run
media group would live in fear for their life or livelihood because of
something that could easily be a mechanical error harkens us back to Cold War
era Soviet stories of people who merely "disappeared."
Or as NBC's Matt Lauer kept saying "were lost"
in the "era of industrialization." Yeah... speaking of snow-jobs...
No Matt Lauer, the Soviet Union didn't "lose"
people or "misplace" them or "forget where they were."
A hardened leftist tyrant who came to power in the
1920's, spent a few years consolidating power into the hands of a very limited
few, who also "fundamentally transformed" his nation had those people
extradited to regions of Russia that were otherwise uninhabitable, or he had
them executed.
People that didn't conform to his ideas, realities, and
"facts" were marginalized, isolated, and eventually dealt with.
Evidently that strict fear of shaking the good will or
reality of Russia's top leadership still exists.
But is America that far behind them?
We have a media complex that reports the administration's
view on almost all things without much variance. The handful of actual outlets
that report actual facts that vary from the administration's talking points are
isolated and marginalized.
Through the fundamental transformation that has seen a
complete dismantling of the private healthcare industry, while simultaneously
eroding individual rights of religious practice, and the destruction of an
economy encouraging private small business growth--the payroll of government
jobs--beholding to the administration and its "great leader" have
been the largest sector for jobs growth in six years.
While preaching tolerance to those who do not accept
their views, the political, theological, and cultural left are the least
tolerant people on the planet.
And while they demand that you yield your beliefs in
order to carry favor with them. You must always accept what they believe as
absolute truth.
Leaders on the left often struggle with a God complex,
one need not doubt that Soviet era authoritarians practiced governance in such
a way.
Putin is a former KGB agent and soviet era operative. A
believer in centralized control, state-based control over the ways and means of
life, not truly accountable to the people, and one that sees his role as vital
to the advancement of a state-centric system to "solve" the
"problems" his people face. Wildly so does President Obama and his
operatives.
They neither feel responsible to tell their people the
truth, nor do the people who are their subjects believe such leaders are
capable of being told the truth.
This is certainly true about federally controlled
healthcare programs that fail on every level. It's true about protecting our
ambassadors when under attack by terrorist operatives in the Middle East. And
evidently it's true about much smaller things.
Even about things as insignificant as an Olympic
snowflake that doesn't quite open.
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