Why the Mainstream Media Should Never Use TPM as a Source

North American Union disappears down the memory hole

Those paying attention to the mainstream media (smearjob) coverage of Rand Paul's bid to win election to the US Senate may have noticed a rather peculiar thing regarding coverage of Paul's comments on the North American Union.

Notably, that they site Talking Points Memo as a source:

Using TPM as a source without fact-checking is a serious mistake.

As it turns out, one only needs to look to the Canadian "no deep integreation with the US" movement to realize that it wasn't merely Paul that shared concerns about some of the things that were being discussed.

Rather, it seems that opposition to the various "North American Union" initiatives was actually quite commonplace across ideological divisions.

The only mistake Paul actually makes is when he insists that those possibly planning such a superhighway were open about everything they were planning. Rather, the movers and shakers behind such initiatives were anything but open.

In fact, whenever political and business leaders have met to plan such initiatives as the Security and Prosperity Partnership, these meetings were conducted entirely in secret.

The reasons for this are just as likely to be due to security concerns as they were to a desire for secrecy -- although many participants at these meetings noted that some of the things under discussion would likely be unpalatable to the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Under the Obama administration, the US government quietly shelved the SPP in 2009.

The ideologically- and politically-motivated community that convenes around TPM are treating these Rand Paul/Ron Paul revelations as quite a prized find. The clear intent is to pass Rand Paul off as a conspiracy nut.

The problem is that in order to do this, they have to flush a great deal of publicly verifiable facts, as well as left-wing NAU conspiracy theories, down the memory hole.

It's unlikely that the general public will ever know about all of the proposals discussed at these meetings regarding North American integration. It wouldn't be shocking to many to discover that projects such as a North American super-autobahn were dicussed.

Projects such as the Texas Corridor could certainly facilitate such projects as a series of North American trunk highways -- a Mexico-city to Toronto super-autobahn being part of such a development. Likewise, efforts to further open North American borders to facilitate the movement of people and commodities between the three countries could progress toward a virtually borderless continent.

In another time and place it would be the TPM community that would be denouncing these kinds of projects as leading to the loss of the individual sovereignty of the three countries.

After all, they continue to oppose NAFTA to the extent that Barack Obama felt he could politically benefit by pandering to them with a possible NAFTA abrogation.

But when they suddenly have the opportunity to benefit ideologically and politically from mocking such notions, it all goes down the memory hole.

And this is what the mainstream media is evidently using as its sources -- not wise.