Mainstream liberals - Court Jesters in the service of King George

This article from last October in the London Review of Books more eloquently states what I've tried to say for a few years now about mainstream liberals. We can include people like Barack Obama and Hillary in their ilk- are they still calling Hillary a liberal?

Although the term "liberal" has been so bastardized by both the left and right in the narrow political spectrum of the mainstream media, like many other terms in our Orwellian national "dialogue" (including the term dialogue, "liberal" has come to be used in reference to something the term originally had nothing to do with - specifically, court jesters in the service of the power apparatus.

The most obvious examples of court jestering are liberal celebrities, specifically Bono, who routinely "courts" world leaders while wearing ridiculous looking over-sized pink sunglasses. An entire liberal radio network called Air America featured hosts whose primary occupations were professional comedians. And how many political punk bands are there who dress almost literally like clowns, sing about their system not working for me and then sign contracts for a record label owned by a major media conglomerate, and expect me to take them seriously?

But at least these celebrities, however bad their approach, are opposed to the Iraq war.

This article takes on the liberal intelligentsia, particularly those who favored the war at the outset, and who now, in their big media outlets, refuse to even consider that whatever the US does is at all unjust and pure.Bush’s Useful Idiots: Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America

Magazines and newspapers of the traditional liberal centre – the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times itself – fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.
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In today’s America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

This was followed by a response from a few American liberals who I have no interest in (Ackerman and Gitlin - "A-G" below), popular with people who read the New York Times and other garbage, then that response was commented on by Edward Herman, a man who actually does challenge US power in his writings.

In short, an imperial and militarized state will use its military power relentlessly, and the feedback effects of this chronic warfare are inevitably going to entail encroachments on domestic freedom. But A-G can’t confront this deeper relationship and challenge militarism and the imperial state. They adapt to it, and in the process “liberal principles” are compromised and thrust aside, and the liberals do in fact serve as the imperial state’s “useful idiots.”