Category: History

When the Revolution Came

2/1/2013

When the revolution came, no one recognized it.

"The media's lying to us? Yeah, right. You people should go to jail."

Those who could see found their vision had no light, their voice had no audience.

They had nowhere to go. The few true revolutionaries looked within for freedom, for genuine solutions to problems and for the truth.

It was a movement with no sound or fury, a concoction of like-minded people who decided the box had nothing to offer them. They would meet every so often to provide comfort to one another.

The rest of society simply ignored them. They knew what was best for themselves and for others. Very soon they outlawed questions by refusing to answer them.

This is how a lie became the truth. The revolutionaries are nothing more than a memory somewhere deep in the archives of the Town that Time Forgot.

No one will ever ask about the time capsule of the revolutionaries and their ideas. It's not that they don't care. They just don't know how.

Now they don't even recognize themselves. Who says you need a gun to dictate to the masses? Some just dictate themselves.

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Presidential Campaigns Have Their Own Dialogue

7/4/2012

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Throughout every recent presidential campaign, a dialogue develops in the media between the major candidates for the job. The candidate best able to position themselves before the public takes the job.

The dialogue has its context. Voters have a distinct perception of the most important issue, how well or how poorly the economy is doing. And they hear reports of how wars are going.

This perception is how Ronald Reagan used the phrase “Morning in America” in his re-election campaign of 1984. As the public already believed, rightly or wrongly, that the nation had peace and prosperity, Reagan’s dialogue was strengthened.

As a way of telling the public not to argue with success, he said of his opponent, Walter Mondale, that he “never met a tax he didn’t hike” and that he “taxes [Reagan’s] patience.” Mondale’s response, that he was being “honest” about the need for new taxes, got lost in the dialogue. Given the choice of a candidate who promised jobs and a candidate who promised the truth, voters as a group were conditioned to optimism and believed they could have both.

A dialogue over taxes took over the following election between Vice President George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Bush lacked his predecessor’s congenial manner and used issues in a more cynical way.

Bush’s dialogue included phrases such as “read my lips, no new taxes” and a name for his opponent’s state, “Taxachusetts.” But on the issue of crime, he repeatedly named a man who had been released as part of the Massachusetts furlough program and who had then raped a woman. Television commercials made it clear that the prisoner, Willie Horton, was a black man.

It was as if Bush was saying that the voters ought to fear a Dukakis election as crime and taxes would go up. He also threw in Dukakis’ veto of a bill that would have made a teacher’s refusal to lead the pledge of allegiance a crime. It was an assault on Dukakis for some of his ideas of public safety, taxes and patriotism.

Dukakis responded by explaining that a predecessor had started the furlough program and that he (Dukakis) had ended it after the Horton incident. He attacked Bush for promising not to raise taxes (a pledge that came back to haunt Bush albeit too late to help Dukakis). And he made it clear that he had gotten an advisory opinion about the bill on the pledge of allegiance from his state’s highest court, which told him it was unconstitutional.

The dialogue had Dukakis on the defensive even before he answered. Bush picked issues that evoke a visceral response but would not have gotten away with selecting these issues had the economy not be understood by the public to be satisfactory. Bush could not get re-elected because the economy had worsened over the next four years and because he had to defend his own record.

So what is in store for the election of 2012?

The economy has gone from bad in 2008 to…bad in 2012. President Obama will talk about his health care legislation and how the Supreme Court found it to be constitutional.

Mitt Romney will have to find a new way to attack a law patterned to a good extent after a law he signed when governor of Massachusetts. He will also have to explain what he would do differently than Obama in turning around the economy.

The burden is on Romney to find a chord that even some Democrats can agree with. Obama has positioned himself as a somebody. It will take a somebody to beat one.

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9/11: Indictment of Conspiracy

5/12/2010

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From Dead Men Talking: Consequences of Government Lies (c) 2009

The United States government prides itself in having an open form of government. Members of Congress debate in front of spectators and television cameras the laws that they propose. The President of the United States publicly declares signings and vetoes of those bills from Congress. The Supreme Court publishes its opinions on legal issues. Federal agencies usually must release requested information to the public.

Yet a number of governmental actions did not come to the public’s attention at the time they were taken. For instance, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a part of the federal government, overthrew Iranian President Mossadegh in 1953. Very few outside the CIA knew of this coup until the Church Committee of the United States Senate uncovered it in 1975.

So, our government acts secretly in some matters. Reasons for secrecy include potential opposition from the public or from other nations whose support we seek, our intent to blame another party or nation for the action and the interest in protecting the actors from criminal liability. To work around these obstacles, the government would need to devise a plan if it wanted to avoid public scrutiny, frame another party and cover up the tracks of federal officials and others who assist.

The Bush Administration insisted that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were planned and carried out exclusively by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qaeda. However, evidence exists to show that members of the Administration did, in fact, conspire with others to plan and carry out the attacks, which took the lives of almost 3,000 people. To this day, they have avoided substantial public outcry, they successfully pointed the finger at bin Laden and they have produced, through public statements and the creation of the 9/11 Commission, an official explanation that completely exonerates all of them.

As one of the leading conspirators, former Vice President Richard Cheney deserves special attention. He held several responsibilities directly relevant to our nation’s response to airplane hijackers. With President Bush hundreds of miles from the command center where Cheney spent much of 9/11, the Vice President took the role of acting Commander-in-Chief and made a crucial decision about whether to shoot down a hijacked plane.

He also, through an executive order signed by Bush just four months earlier, controlled all federal agencies in their response to attacks with weapons of mass destruction (which airplanes qualify under). Since this order gave him control over the war game simulations taking place that day, his judgment in allowing the simulations to go on despite credible warnings of the attacks should also be questioned.

Three actions by the conspirators enabled them to complete a crime that had already begun with its planning and its initial stages. The conspirators ignored the specific foreknowledge given to them about 9/11. By ignoring it, they failed to warn the air defense, which protects us from hijackings. If the conspirators had not confused the air defense with war game simulations, the air defense would have intercepted or even shoot down hijacked planes before they hit crowded buildings. And the conspirators, as authorities, covered up evidence, which prevented the public from suspecting the conspirators much sooner.

History suggests that we may have a window of opportunity to try high-ranking individuals for criminal conduct. After a similar period of time, official investigators stopped pursuing criminal charges for those who may have been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. If we do not objectively look at the case against the conspirators now, we risk the type of complacency about our government that makes it easier for them to commit other secret criminal acts without any accountability.

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When the Revolution Came

Presidential Campaigns Have Their Own Dialogue

9/11: Indictment of Conspiracy

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