Same players, same referees, same rules, same outcome!

Petrol will be $10 a gallon and people will wait on line to get it.

Iran is just another 70,000,000 pawns in the right wing game plan.

Says who? The Big Dog, Me!

Why? It is not just a crooked letter. It is a crooked Congress, Executive,

and Judicial institution. Capitalism is not for the weak of heart, nor stomach.

The Christian-Islamic world war is continuing. If you have a Guantanamo

and an Arib Gharib (sic) you might as well add in Armageddon.

Wolfie does not think the progressive-liberals have the cunyones to

stop this shite!

by Wolfie (9 articles, 0 quicklinks, 33 diaries, 1208 comments) on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 7:00:10 PM

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"These are the times that try men's souls." Spitting in the wind wouldn't be my choice of metaphor here.

It isn't up to others. It's up to us. 

Failure to act against grave injustice is, as history proves, a decision in support of tyrants. Those with a functioning conscience and who refuse to be governed by fear and loathing need to act.  

People need to show how they feel and protest against these monstrous things daily. We can do so, readily, by wearing an orange ribbon everyday. We can donate to groups fighting this regime, such as World Can't Wait.

The key here is that people not look to others to take care of things. The Democrats aren't doing it and won't do it. The mass media aren't doing it and won't do it.

A movement of the people, a mass movement numbering in the millions, must show itself. Obviously that movement is not apparent to the eye now. But the basis exists for it to come into being. 

Think about the six thousand plus GI's and veterans who are committing suicide every year because they can't bear what they have seen and done. Think about a fraction of these poor souls instead daring to fight the real villains - Bush and Cheney and their cabal and apologists - who are ordering these crimes. What a difference this could make!

Think about the people who are now misled into thinking that they must "support the troops" waking up to the truth that you cannot support people committing atrocities and participating in an immoral war and who instead start to physically block military recruiters and start calling for soldiers to resist their orders?

Think about the millions who hate all of this and everything that Bush and Cheney stand for and concentrate and a fraction of them starting now to act openly for a different path by spreading orange and helping to expose war criminals like John Yoo and demanding his firing?

Think about people in the thousands or more coming to the August Denver Democratic National Convention to protest the complicity of the Democrats with the Bush program?

Think about people in communities everywhere showing in a multitude of public ways - with orange signs on their lawns, orange ribbons on their handbags and backpacks, on their cars, on their backs, on the walls in the neighborhoods and so on - that they don't buy the lies that Bush and Cheney are spreading about Iran and Iraq and won't allow them to wage another illegal and unjust war on Iran?

Think about people posting signs of Iranian children who will die in a military attack on their web pages and on posted signs on sidewalks?

Think of all of the things that people can do right now that would make a measurable impact - humanizing the innocents that this Bush regime and its colluders tell us are all our enemies?

Think what difference it would make if people find the ways to show through pictures and words and song that non-American lives are just as precious as American lives? 

The people in charge now are extremely unpopular. They are like the vampires who cannot stand sunlight. Shine the light on them and they burst into flames and ashes. Even some of their former loyal friends such as Scott McClellan are exposing their evil deeds. The sentiment against these war criminals must not remain latent. People must act.  

by Dr. Dennis Loo (39 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 78 comments) on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 10:46:02 PM

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REFINERS, MILITARY PX'S SELLING CANNED GOODS, THE CARLYLE GROUP,

NORTHRUP, GENERAL MOTORS, COCA-COLA, HALLIBURTON, KBR,

 THE BANKERS, THE GENERALS, THE K STREETERS, THE GREAT AND

GLORIOUS STOCK MARKET.

Makes you wonder if there is anybody left who gives a flock of geese.

Amerika is corrupt! We are the enablers! We get what we give. That is why

everything is turning to shite!

Sorry Doctor Loo, this is my estimation of our society. We are drugged and

given bread and circuses and we are just fine and dandy with it!

I am losing my lunch as I am writing these terrible facts.

by Wolfie (9 articles, 0 quicklinks, 33 diaries, 1208 comments) on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 2:09:23 AM

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Hans Fritzsche, Chief of the N@zi Propaganda Ministry's Radio Division.

Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1946

"Between these criminals and myself there is only one connection: they merely
misused me in a different way than they misused those who became their physical
victims."

"In really serious questions of policy and the conduct of war I did not commit a single falsification and did not consciously tell a single lie."

"But decisive for such a news machine is not the detail but the final fundamental basis on which propaganda is built. Decisive is the belief in the incorruptibility of the leaders of the State, on which every journalist must rely, and this basis is shaken by what has become known today of mass murders, of senseless atrocities and by the doubt in the honesty of Hitler's protestations for peace."

"I am convinced that Hitler and at least some of his colleagues had deliberately lied to the people, in some important instances, right from the beginning of their political career, and, something that is not so important to history, I personally consider that, on these points, I have been deceived."

"The main guilt of people such as Fritzsche is that they did know the actual state of affairs, but despite this, proceeding according to the criminal intentions of the Hitler Government, intentionally fed the people with lies or, to use an everyday expression, 'threw dust in their eyes.'" ~ Ferdinand Schoerner

by dotmafia (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 127 comments [8 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 2:51:51 AM

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This is a good article and we should really pay attention to the potential parallels when it comes to "run-up" and Iran. The stats on the suicides are just plain frightening.

However, "Scotty", as he affectionately known around here in TX political circles, is first of all the product of a political family, from whom you can expect anything (some say his mother is a complete bombast). I'm sure he was paid handsomely to write this book, it will surely guarantee him some kind of place in history as a squealer and certainly a high paying job, either back here in TX or in DC, and it has been released so perilously close to the end of Bush's term that there isn't much that anyone can do about any of the "revelations", if they really are that, anyway.

Everyone will feign being disgruntled, heartbroken, dismayed and disappointed in the behaviour of the former "loyal", "trusted" aide, and everyone will go into temporary self-serving denial and we will all forget about it in a week or so. Just don't buy the damn book. It's all Washington hype and hoorah in an election year. It is truly amazing how we all fall for sensationalism, over and over again.

Besides, no one who has half a brain can even pretend to be "shocked" by any of this! We all knew the hot air coming from the WH was nonsense from the beginning. Think back: how many times did "Scotty" stumble and grope for words when responding to reporters? He was making this up as he went along, and he's no Indiana Jones!

by Ivan Hentschel (12 articles, 0 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 302 comments [4 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 8:10:44 AM

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When Stanley Milgram conducted his famous 1960 experiment at Yale in which he put men in gray coats who instructed individuals to administer shocks to others answering questions incorrectly, he was measuring obedience. His hypothesis was that Germans were somehow more obedient than other nations' peoples and that this is why the Nazis were allowed to come to power and to stay in power. He found, however, that Americans were just as obedient and willing to torture others. 

But the truth doesn't end there. While people have a tremendous capacity for doing monstrous things when ordered to by their leaders and an all-too great capacity for self-deception, the problems we face today don't principally grow out of this human frailty.  

The problem is two-fold. On the one hand, it has to do with group dynamics and the fact that we are social creatures. We are socialized to tend by default to follow group norms and to conform. If we didn't tend to do this as a whole, we would be endangering our own survival.

The other factor at work here is that there is a material basis for many Americans to look the other way because their own lives are relatively comfortable. This is a real problem. But it is resolvable. People need to be struggled with to look beyond their own immediate circumstances. Some Americans are bought off and hopeless. Other Americans are simply beside themselves in grief and anger about what's going on. They are ready and willing to do something. (A sizable number of these people are wasting their time right now hoping and praying that Obama will come to the rescue.) And still other Americans can be won to doing something by the leadership of others.

We must find the ways to break people away from the default mode of obedience. An alternative leadership must be created. The main reason things are so hard and maddening at this point is because the task of bringing forth a competing leadership to the existing misleadership of the mass media and the Democratic Party is a very difficult one.

These times, however, clearly warrant and require this.

Imagine a modified scenario of the Milgram Experiment in which someone wearing an orange coat breaks into the room in which the man in the gray coat and the subject are and says: "Stop! Don't do it! You don't have to obey! Resist! Stand up!" In this instance, the person in the orange coat would be successful in breaking away from the spell of the gray coats of a sizable portion of the subjects. 

This is, in fact, what psychological experimenters have found. When someone breaks away from "pluralistic ignorance" they dramatically alter the social dynamics and people who were in thrall to group think are freed to act differently. See click here.

In the 1960s, as Henry Kissinger has written, the anti-war movement and SDS in particular came to exercise influence and leadership over a huge swath of the American people because there was a vacuum of leadership, the so-called "credibility gap" in which most Americans didn't believe what the President and the country's leadership were saying.

In our times, a relatively small group of people who take the moral high ground against the torturers and against those who are colluding with the torturers (e.g., Pelosi, Clinton and Obama who have refused to end torture even though for eight years it has been both in their power to do so and their moral and legal responsibility) could swing tens of millions away from the sway of the existing leaders. The vulnerability of the Bush regime and its apologists and enablers is that they are doing monstrous, indefensible things AND they are immensely unpopular. They have no legal or moral leg to stand on and their unpopularity needs to be made visible in day to day life. That is part of the point of the wearing orange daily campaign - to make the invisible a material force. 

The problem, Wolfie, isn't that too many people like and support Bush and Cheney. The large majority don't like them and wish they were gone.

They, however, need leadership to show them an alternative path. That leadership must step forward from the ranks. That means people like you. 

What needs to happen here is to a significant extent unprecedented. It's made more difficult by the fact that Americans do not have the rich tradition that countries such as France do where people will take to the streets readily.

Yet there are many, many examples of what can and has happened when individuals dare to step away from the group and declare that there is another way. I have written about this quite a bit. See, for example, click here.  

As the World Can't Wait Call states:

"history is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US."

by Dr. Dennis Loo (39 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 78 comments) on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 8:34:00 AM

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Benjamin Franklin warned us, Ike warned us...and many, many others....and here we are just the same, clueless.  'Us' seems pretty ineffective.

by Roger (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 465 comments [22 recommended, 1 rejected]) on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 8:14:52 PM

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