What's News?

[Michael]

I encourage those of you who give this column a peek now and again to become familiar with the sources of real news that are on the net.

You, of course, will get about 15 minutes of sound bites on the evening news shows. I realize that the show takes up 30 minutes, but the mindless commercials take up about half of that time.

You can watch the twenty-four hour news stations like MSNBC or CNN. They might be a bit better, but in their attempts to be fair and balanced, they skip some news stories, like those about the administration’s giving TV news organizations “news stories”, already packaged. This saves the networks, all of whom are owned by billionaire Bush supporters, the money of having to send their own “investigative reporters” out into the field. The administration has “investigated” the news stories for them. It’s amazing how administration friendly these packaged “news” segments are.

Do a Google search on Armstrong Williams or Karen Ryan.

You won’t find these stories emanating from your TV sets because television is complicit in committing the crimes.

When Hitler or The Soviet Union ran the news, it was called propaganda. Government propaganda posing as “real news” is illegal in The Former United States of America.

Wasn’t congress ready to impeach a president recently because of his person peccadilloes? He didn’t even break the law.

Since we’re talking about real news, let’s just keep Fox News out of it, OK? OK.

So, back to my original statement. I enjoy ANTI WAR.COM, although it’s run by Libertarians, the only authentic conservative group in our nation. Pat Buchanan is a regular contributor, so it’s obviously not a “progressive” site.

I read ANTI WAR.COM because they know the difference between a war of necessity and a war of choice. They attempt to be truthful in promoting their otherwise “conservative” agenda.

I also read the Common Dreams NEWS CENTER which is a progressive site.

I dare say that sites such as these two will give you, as Paul Harvey says, “the rest of the story” or even stories that TV doesn’t give you at all!

One story at ANTI WAR.COM is entitled “Pentagon Reaffirms Globocop Role”, written by Jim Lobe.

If you know anything about the so-called “Bush Doctrine”, you know that it’s the foundation for this administration’s foreign policy. Preemptive strikes are the foundation of “The Bush Doctrine”.

“Pentagon Reaffirms Globocop Role” goes into detail as to what that doctrine means.

If you read it you’ll find out that we won’t only preemptively strike a “rogue” state that the administration thinks means us harm, but we’ll even strike one of our own allies if the administration doesn’t think it’s doing enough to prevent/curtail terrorism. Yep, you read that right.

When it comes to the military, I’m with John Quincy Adams. “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

I know that things were a bit different back then, but I’m a bit of a “Libertarian” on that – and that’s all (except for letting us put what we want into our own bodies, but I digress.).

The original thought was that each colony was going to maintain a militia for defensive purposes. That led to a unified military for defensive purposes.

Well, boy, have we come a long way since then. Wilson changed our minds on that and Bush is picking up where he left off (well, LBJ couldn’t mind our own business either).

Should we have invaded China for torturing people because of the Tiananmen Square pro democracy protests? What about China’s position towards female infants? Aren’t they tossing them aside like trash?

How about Saudi Arabia? They mutilate female infants as well, don’t they?

Why did we decide to “bring democracy” to Iraq, a country of 29 million when a country of 3 billion is led by an equally tyrannical government?

Was it OK to carpet bomb Vietnam or Iraq?

Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki really as philanthropic as they’re made out to be? “Look at all the lives those nukes ended up saving.” Oh, really? We needed to do it twice to save lives? Is that like killing Iraqis to free them?

Our military is to protect The United States of America, if it ever reestablishes itself as such. It’s not and never has been to save the world.

This administration talks about morality and “family values”. It calls itself “pro life” because it’s against abortion and/or euthanasia. I don’t see our actions in Iraq as being “pro life”, nor do I see the death penalty as being “pro life”.

What morality? Whose “values”?

They sure are good at cherry picking definitions, aren’t they?

Mahatma Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

Sleep walking through life makes one “comfortably numb”, if I may borrow that phrase. We are a nation of sheeple because thinking for one’s self hurts too much.

The administration has gone from one excuse to another to another to defend our invading and occupying Iraq and the sheeple just follow as long as the government says, “Simon says” or is it “Dubya says”?

It’s the same shit we heard in the sixties. “The US, love it or leave it”.

Well, to paraphrase another comment, how can someone claim to love America so much while hating Americans?

People do awful things to other people. They rob others’ belongings. They shoot and stab one another. Sometimes they do the second so that they can accomplish the first.

They abuse their children, their spouses, their parents.

They lay people off even though the work load isn’t any less and force those left behind to “pick up the slack” or send the work to places like, well, China, where the workers are paid a good deal less than a pittance and work under conditions that rival the slaves’ conditions in the US or even the Nazi concentration camps. And, yes, just like under those two conditions, there’s killing and torture for lack of productivity (read “When Corporations Rule The World” by David Korten).

There’s all kinds of terrible things that happen to people within national borders, including those of the US. We have to stop that mistreatment of one another before we go using military might to stop the leaders of other countries from mistreating their citizenry. You can see what happens to caring for our own fellow citizens when we spend our resources forcing citizens of other lands to “care for” each other.

It isn’t that we can’t see the forest for the trees. We’re just perched so high and think we’re so mighty that we look over and beyond the forests and ignore them while they burn to the ground. We’re too busy starting fires in everyone else’s forests.

Watch the TV sound bites and repetition every hour of Michael Jackson’s trial, but, for the love of country and fellow citizens, read the real news as well!

[hester_prynne]

Hi Michael and thank you for a very rich post!
I can't wait to check out these news links you've shared. They sound really good, I've been looking everywhere for news sources that aren't bought out.....I agree with you about tv news, it's just plain and obviously lame.

Thanks again for the links....
You've no idea.....
H

[jimboloco]

Oh yeah and we are letting Lockheed sell its wares to India and Pakistan at the same time, a commercial arms race....otherwise, thay say, thay might have to close the Lockheed factory in Ft worthless Texass.

We are at the most hateful, and scarier because the American people seem to be buying it.

[Michael]

Rumi, you’re very welcome. Do me a favor and pass them around.

Keep in mind it’s still important to watch not only the lame news, but the way the right is presenting the news. You can’t fight against or even for something if you don’t know what it is you’re representing or resenting.

Jim, tell me, when did the switch come along? Did we ever stand for truth, justice and the American way or was that just a front for how we’ve always been?

It’s confusing when you think about how we gained control of this home of the brave and land of the free. There were free and brave people here before Europeans arrived and, well, I guess there wasn’t enough room for all of that freedom. So theirs had to go.

[jimboloco]

The concept of the enemy and betrayal to our own military is what is driving this latest "admission" by Jane Fonda that she had betrayed the Americal military when she visited the NVA anti-aircraft site. While it may earn her some well deserved grace, it does not adirectly address the original conundrum: why we became enemies in the first place, when a stronger, better evolution in Vietnam was already in place, had we merely offered help and even neutrality. But the social brainwashing endures, prevents clarity, so the nationalist ferver continues.

I haven't a clue where it all started.

Jim, tell me, when did the switch come along? Did we ever stand for truth, justice and the American way or was that just a front for how we’ve always been?

we've been bullshitted ever since we were born.
and as we "evolve" with multi-racial assimilation and hopes that demographics will become progressive changings, we see more of the same, just an assimilation of anybody who is willing to conform and serve the system, meaning in the military which is at the service of the allmighty.