Fear Mongering Flop

Knowledgeable pundits call it “threat exaggeration.” I call it fear mongering, and the corporate media is doing a relatively poor job of it recently with respect to ISIS, which is either a pharmaceutical company in Carlsbad CA that is almost certainly thinking of changing its name, or a terrorist/military organization that is attempting to form a state in Iraq and Syria.

Imagine the poor damned drug salesman who has to walk into a doctor’s office and cheerfully say to the receptionist, “Good morning, I’m Bill and I’m here from ISIS.” The corporate media is doing sufficient fear mongering for that to create a problem.

For a while last week they were trying to freak us out by “reporting” that ISIS had captured chemical weapons from the Syrian Army stockpiles where they had overrun Syrian positions. There were a couple of problems with that, one being that they had not recently overrun any Syrian positions, and the other being that the Obama administration had spent more than a year bragging about how we had confiscated 100% of Assad’s chemical weapons, leaving none for ISIS to capture. Soooo… They sort of had to let got of that little ploy.

Now they are hyperventilating about how someone, they don’t know who, is teaching ISIS how to fly three captured Syrian fighter jets, meaning that ISIS will now have an “air force.” This one is not going to fly either, pun intended, because even the civilian most ignorant of military affairs is rather quickly going to figure out that three fighter jets being flown by pilots who only learned to fly them last week is hardly much of a threat.

One has to wonder what the media’s next “discovery” will be.