Ostriches
Our governmental system was created because humans lie. Or because our founders believed that men in power, given the chance, will always lie. Therefore they put in a system with checks and balances. We've learned about checks and balances from the first time we took a government class about. Maybe we've heard about it too much. Meaning that like all of those rights in the Constitution and the first ten amendments, we now take them for granted and don't realize the price that has been paid for them over the preceding 225+ years. If you ain't checkin' it ain't bein' balanced.

The reason I bring all of this up is because I got a book in the mail the other day. My wife buys and sells things on eBay and the other day she bought me Jim Garrison's book, On the Trail of the Assassins. As I was reading through the introduction I came across an interesting couple of paragraphs. He's going through how he went from someone that blindly trusted his government to a person that believed his government murdered the president because he was going to change the Cold War foreign policy and also withdraw from Vietnam. He writes:

At the outset I must underscore the fact that the details of the assassination - who pulled a trigger, from what building, what kind of gun, and so forth - are no longer my primary concerns. The assassination was an enormously important event. But even more important, in my view, is what happened after - ratification by the government and the media of an official story that is an absurd fairy tale.

Immediately after the assassination, the federal government and the major media adopted the posture of two giant ostriches, each unyielding to reason, each with its head firmly lodged in the sand. Having ratified the lone assassin theory, they refused to acknowledge any facts that might discredit it and attacked anyone who offered a different explanation.

It was not too difficult to figure out what their dilemma was. For the government and the major media to have acknowledged what virtually everyone knew (that Kennedy had been fired at by a number of guns) would have put an end to the sacred pretense that the President's assassination was a chance occurrence. To have acknowledged a conspiracy would have led inevitably to the question of why it had occurred. There then would have followed recognition that there had been powerful opposition in the government to President Kennedy's efforts to end the Cold War. His desire to withdraw from Vietnam, for example, would have been revealed. Correspondingly, the role of those who dragged us into nine years of war in Vietnam also would have become clearer.

This lays out a formula of how our government and media sucks the people in when they have to do something that they see "have" to be done. We have a line - Saddam has WMD, Abu Ghraib was a "few bad apples", It was 19 dudes that did 9/11, etc.. - the government and the media say it's so and anyone that disagress with it is a conspiracy theorist. The American people stopped thinking quite a while ago. Maybe it was the assassination of JFK that started it, I doubt it though. It's a Straussian dilemma. Do you believe the people know what's best for themselves? Well our country hasn't been run that way for a long time, maybe..probably never was.


the reason I bring all of this up is because, in case you forgot, there is still a war going on in Iraq, Guerrillas Shoot down Helicopter, Killing 11 (6 Americans). There are still many, many people dying over there. I know, I know, the American casualties are way down. Tell that to this soldiers family. (If I Google their name and find a local news story on them it really humanizes them and makes me realize exactly how horrible this war really is). Not to mention the Iraqi's that continue to die in much higher numbers. The reason(s) we went there and stay there are all bullshit! Your government and the media, those same ostriches, will not acknowledge that fact. Because if they did they would have to explain what is really going on.

A couple from Naomi Klein:
Smoking while Iraq burns and You asked for my evidence, Mr Ambassador. Here it is
- posted by Mom/Dad @ 9:30 AM