Poppies: Who Contols The Voters' hearts and Minds

By Ghost Who Walks - September 11, 2008, 5:29AM

Pay attention now. Because over the next week we might see a bit of sleight of hand, as the press decides that Sarah Palin is really too much and that McCain's halo has been horribly tarnished.

Pay attention. Because will that really be the way the process goes, will that really be their way of forming a decision? Is the press really assessing public opinion, or simply mapping its own new narratives onto the popular scene and making its own presumptions seem like "reality"? And is there an ulterior force(s) behind that presumption?

Ever since Eric Boehlert wrote his nice little expose on shared suspended disbelief of reality, I've been waiting to see which blogs left and right would pick up on the phenomenon - the self-pleasing ability to jointly ignore huge swaths of obvious documented fact to collectively adopt a contrary opinion. Psychological studies show that well-educated people perversely are better able to use their IQ's to adopt positions unsupported by facts. And recent studies show the larger the social group, the more intelligent the species of ape. So here we display a group participatory ability at self-delusion encompassing millions at a time (not that this is a fair study - lower primates don't have TV & internet to work with).

But here's the problem. When working with groups this large and influences this complex, it becomes difficult to say whether we deluded ourselves, or whether someone deluded us instead, figuring out which buttons to press to make us think we were turning that remote-controlled car?

Because as Boehlert points out, the press, the Democrats and basically all of us assumed a patronizingly untrue version of reality to drive through a particular view of reality and subsequent "obvious" result. And Democrats are supposed to be the less media-savvy - Republicans are the "manipulative ones". And the press is supposedly "free" and "independent", even as they come across so repetitive, mimicking each other with the same catch phrases and press release soundbites so they look more like chorus girl dancers and Gregorian chanters than free thinkers and analysts.

So what's the mechanism at play when Mark Halperin suddenly wakes up after several years of extreme R.E.M. sleep and notices that Republicans lie profoundly and obviously about just about everything when they get on TV or the campaign stump (including an impressive coordinated perversion of reality we call "spin", though it would be less impressive if there were less willful suspension of belief amongst the audience)? And that McCain and Palin are indeed true to this perverted Republicanism. Is Mark Halperin just a lone clairvoyant Rumpelstilskin? Or has 100 years passed for Sleeping Beauty's kingdom and Obama is our prince? Or is it just another fairy tale, where the wicked witch ensconced in yonder dark castle is peering yet again into her magic crystal ball, ready to unleash her flying monkeys on a new attack, or to put the kingdom to slumber anew, with slightly different dreams but similar results, whispering "sleep, poppies, sleep, poppies, sleep...."

In short, who's in control here? And why exactly did we think *WE* were?

I'm afraid I know the answer to that....so, where are all those poppies? We might all be needing them before this painful nightmare is over.

(Brainwashing, throughout school, could have something to do with our enduring belief in that which has not been, except in our delusions, in a very long time; an American democratic republic. That could be why we do not yet comprehend that the America we thought we knew began, obviously, disappearing almost 5 decades ago, when bullets were swapped for ballots and America became just another banana republic but with a good P.R. team.)


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Bush Re-writes History, Again!

Here's the thing about this:

There is a definite pattern of behavior on the part of the Bush administration from, at least, the first days of the "Iraq war roll-out." It is a pattern of out-right lies, exaggerations, constant re-writes of history, refusal to answer questions by members of Congress and/or refusal to submit to over-sight, and therefore, to be accountable to the American people. (We are not forgetting GOP congressional complicity, either.)

Actually, come to think of it, the pattern of lying and stone-walling began with 9/11.

Now, they are doing it again. They are re-writing history; creating a false flow of events, trying to make their "surge" seem more reasonable to unsuspecting Americans, who haven't been paying close attention to time frames.

How many more times will Congress allow this behavior?

I wouldn't put up with it from a 5 year old!

WASHIGNTON : President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration's statements about Iraq.

President Bush unveiled the new version on Wednesday during his nationally televised speech announcing his new Iraq policy.

When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had
cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation," he said. "We thought
that these elections would bring Iraqis together - and that as we trained Iraqi
security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

"But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq -
particularly in Baghdad - overwhelmed the political gains Iraqis had made.
Al-Qaida terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that
Iraq's election posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts
of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. "They blew up one of the holiest shrines in
Shia Islam - the Golden Mosque of Samarra - in a calculated effort to provoke
Iraq's Shia population to retaliate.

"Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran,
formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence
that continues today."

That version of events helps to justify Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq, in which U.S. forces will largely target Sunni insurgents and leave it to Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite government to - perhaps - disarm its allies in Shiite militias and death squads. But the president's account understates by at least 15 months when Shiite death squads began targeting Sunni politicians and clerics. It also ignores the role that Iranian-backed Shiite groups had in death squad activities prior to the Samarra bombing.

Blaming the start of sectarian violence in Iraq on the Golden Dome bombing risks policy errors because it underestimates the depth of sectarian hatred in Iraq and overlooks the conflict's root causes.

The Bush account also fails to acknowledge that Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite groups stoked the conflict. Bush's national security adviser Stephen Hadley used the same version of events in an appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Much like the administration's pre-war claims about Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaida and purported nuclear weapons program, the claims about the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra ignore inconvenient facts and highlight questionable but politically useful assumptions.

No one disagrees that the February bombing of the Golden Dome shrine was a pivotal moment. In the days following the attack, armed Shiites stormed Sunni mosques and neighborhoods, killing hundreds. Baghdad's Sunni residents responded by arming themselves, and Sunni insurgents set off car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods. By October, the monthly death toll was reaching into the thousands. U.S. diplomats, reporters and military and intelligence officers began reporting that Shiite death squads were targeting Sunni clerics and former officials of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime at least 15 months before the Samarra bombing.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell urged a U.S. offensive against radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in 2004. But he was overruled by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. They argued against fighting a two-front war against Sunni insurgents and Shiite militants.

The concerns about Shiite militias grew after the Jan. 30, 2005, elections that brought the Shiite-led government of then-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to power. Journalists in Iraq, the CIA station, the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. military all reported throughout 2005 that evidence was mounting that Jaafari's government was incorporating Shiite militias and death squads into the Iraqi army and police. A year before the Samarra bombing, Hannah Allam, writing for what was then Knight Ridder Newspapers, reported that Iraq could be headed toward civil war. Knight Ridder was purchased by The McClatchy Co. last June.

"Shiite Muslim assassins are killing former members of Saddam Hussein's mostly Sunni Muslim regime with impunity in a wave of violence that, combined with the ongoing Sunni insurgency, threatens to escalate into civil war," Allam, then the news organization's Baghdad bureau chief, wrote on Feb. 27, 2005. "The war between Shiite vigilantes and former Baath Party members is seldom investigated and largely overshadowed by the insurgency." She added, "Iraq's new Shiite leaders have little interest in prosecuting those who kill their former oppressors or their enemies in the insurgency."

The story quoted the then-spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, Sabah Kadhim: "It's the beginning, and we could go down the slippery slope very quickly. ... Both sides are sharpening their knives."

By the summer, the tortured bodies of kidnapped Sunni clerics had begun turning up regularly on Baghdad's streets, and on Aug. 10, 2005, Knight Ridder correspondent Tom Lasseter wrote: "A militant Shiite Muslim group with close ties to Iran has gained enormous power since Iraq's January elections and now is accused of conducting a terror campaign against Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority that includes kidnappings, threats and murders." Lasseter identified the group as the Badr Organization and reported that Iraq's interior minister was associated with it.

On Nov. 15, 2005, U.S. troops raided an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad and found 169 malnourished prisoners, many of whom had been tortured. The vast majority of the victims, if not all of them, were Sunnis.

By December, Badr's involvement in death squads was widely known. "The Iranian-backed militia the Badr Organization has taken over many of the Iraqi Interior Ministry's intelligence activities and infiltrated its elite commando units," Lasseter wrote, on Dec. 12, 2005, citing U.S. and Iraqi officials. "That's enabled the Shiite Muslim militia to use Interior Ministry vehicles and equipment - much of it bought with American money - to carry out revenge attacks against the minority Sunni Muslims, who persecuted the Shiites under Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein," he added.

Beginning in 2002, the administration's case for a pre-emptive war in Iraq was plagued by similar oversights, oversimplifications, misjudgments and misinformation. Unlike the administration's claims about the Samarra bombing, however, much of that information was peddled by Iraqi exiles and defectors and accepted by some eager officials and journalists.

The best known of those pre-war claims was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program - Bush's primary stated reason for invading Iraq. Administration officials and their allies also claimed that Saddam had trained terrorists to hijack airplanes; that a Saddam emissary had met with lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague; that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes that could be used only to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons; that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from the African country of Niger; that Iraqis would greet American troops as liberators; and that Iraqi oil revenues would cover most of the cost of the war.

The administration has continued to offer inaccurate information to Congress, the American people and sometimes to itself.

The Iraq Study Group, in its December report, concluded, for example, that the U.S. military was systematically under-reporting the violence in Iraq in an effort to disguise policy failings. The group recommended that the military change its reporting system.

Whether many of the administration's statements about Iraq for nearly five years have been deliberately misleading or honest but gullible mistakes hasn't been determined. The Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete an investigation into the issue that was begun but stalled when Republicans controlled the committee.

On Thursday, frustration over the accuracy of administration statements on Iraq boiled over during Rice's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. "Madam Secretary," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., "I have supported you and the administration on the war, and I cannot continue to support the administration's position. I have not been told the truth over and over again by administration witnesses, and the American people have not been told the truth."