Oh Tarzie at the Rancid Honey-Trap, points out what still isn’t clear to many people:

People don’t get on the major media unless  their “dissent” is useful to the powers-that-be.

If  they really threatened the power-structure, they wouldn’t be anywhere on the networks.

A cone of silence would descend. They would suddenly find themselves in some fringe area of the net, ignored by the right people and overlooked by the rest.

Read what happened when liberal commentator Chris Hayes timidly criticized the overuse of the word, “hero.” He correctly noted that it  encouraged  jingoism and militarism…and then he swiftly recanted:

Let me spell it out: Someone in some high place finds Hayes useful. If and when he’s no longer useful, he’ll be purged. There was a very public reminder to this effect in May when, on a Memorial Day program, Hayes expressed ambivalence about the word “hero”, because it is “so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.”

Even though Hayes offered this tepid remark in a segment rich with militarist schmaltz, right wing pundits and veterans groups pounced. The next day, Hayes issued a revolting apology which went above and beyond the normal requirements of atonement, complete with the far right-wing suggestion that civilians can’t really speak with authority on military matters……”

Lila:

Hayes’ apology was completely uncalled for, for two reasons:

One. The military is intended, constitutionally, to be under the civilian command.
Two. Civilians have often been more militaristic than the military.

So why did Hayes grovel?

Tarzie explains:

“Public capitulation rituals of this kind aren’t just a part of heat vampire liberalism; they are, in fact, its very essence. This is basically what DeBoer’s Marx/Daschle formulation describes: a clear eyed, even radical, assessment of all that’s wrong in the world coexisting with acquiescence in oligarch-approved methods for putting things right, no matter how often and resoundingly these methods fail.

So constituted, heat vampire liberals act as role models for the rest of us, reconciling things that aren’t logically reconcilable, successfully wrestling themselves into compliance with status quo fundamentals while bemoaning the particulars.”

That’s why it’s imperative to call out “official dissenters.”
I know it looks churlish: Aren’t there much worthier targets than Mr. Hayes, who makes so many apt criticisms of  war and the police-state?

No, no, a thousand times no.

There’s no hope at all of real public outrage so long as  “domesticated outrage” flourishes without embarrassment.
Hayes and Greenwald and Snowden and Assange and the rest   aren’t simply co-opted. They are actively “instructing” the rest of us in compliance. They are conscious conduits for the “second-level” brain-washing that faces anyone who extricates himself from  the”first-level” brainwashing of the masses.