Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Blame Clinton
I’ve got opinions with which just about everyone agrees, and some of the other opinions I have find sympathy only in very few. There are some opinions I have, with which nobody agrees, anywhere, but I’m still sure I’m right about them. And to my credit, or shame, or both, I’m not shy about them.
I have one opinion which finds no other voice in the wilderness but mine, that I’m sure will be proven more and more correct with the passage of time. It goes like this: Like a collective of ants, our country tends to hammer out strategies on a collective basis, even when we think we’re doing our thinking as individuals — and after 1998, we don’t do this with the same competence we did before. And for this, I blame former President Clinton. I do, I really really do. He’s hurt us in ways that aren’t quite evident yet, but will be harder to deny in the years to come, and I’ll bet my left nut on it.
For evidence, I cite the following. And I’m willing to consider that before 1998, such a thing might have happened, but for the life of me I don’t recall any such thing. Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania (R) has been hammering the “Able Danger” scandal which, if there’s something to it, stands a great chance of discrediting the 9/11 investigation of last year. The latest event is an announcement from the Congressman that he has a witness willing to testify to the destruction of a huge amount of documentation “that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks.”
The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.
Weldon declined to identify the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as �2.5 terabytes� � as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added.
But a spokesman for the Pentagon challenged this — not only challenged it, but directly refuted the claims made by Congressman Weldon.
Army Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman, said officials have been �fact-finding in earnest for quite some time.�
�We�ve interviewed 80 people involved with Able Danger, combed through hundreds of thousands of documents and millions of e-mails and have still found no documentation of Mohamed Atta,� Swiergosz said.
He added that certain data had to be destroyed in accordance with existing regulations regarding �intelligence data on U.S. persons.�
Now here’s my point: Major Swiergosz is lying, or else, goddamn it, Congressman Weldon is lying. If both of these sources are telling the truth, then one or the other is so woefully uninformed that that person might as well be lying his ass off. And that, I’m afraid, is about as complicated as the matter gets.
And this is the opinion I have, with which nobody else agrees. In January of 1998 our President at the time engaged in an act of fraud that, before then, would have been an act of political and career suicide for any Commander-In-Chief, Senator, Congressman, staffer, justice, judge, state legislator, selectman, postmaster general or dog-catcher. I don’t mean to imply that politicians got fired when they lied prior to ’98 — but they were supposed to get fired if they were caught lying. And that means lying about sex, lying about killing people, lying about eighteen-minute gaps in audio tapes, lying about eye-before-ee-except-after-see, lying about putting your left leg or your right leg in your trousers first when you got dressed. Lying about anything. That’s what I remember.
And because of that, in my recollection, even with a reputation for lying, politicians were afraid of saying anything substantial. At the time, people didn’t like it. Now I’m nostalgic for it.
Congressman Weldon’s comments are accurate, or else they’re not. Somewhere, someone knows which is which, and presumably that someone includes Weldon and Swiergosz. Why, then, is this a matter of debate? Clearly, it should not be. We continue to put up with this, and then, still, we expect to be given truthful information that is sufficiently moored to reality to mean something. But we have no reason to expect such a thing. For seven years, our leaders and spokesmen have told us whatever they figure they need to tell us to serve their masters, and we just let them.
I blame Clinton. Certainly, he’s not the first politician to lie about something. But he’s the first one, that I know of, to lie, fully expect to get caught doing it, fully expect to be let off after being caught lying, and to actually be correct about it. You’d have to be an idiot to deny his everlasting impact on our prevailing culture, and once you acknowledge that, you have to blame him somewhat too.
This is a problem. We may fix this someday. I think we will. But that will only happen after a massive bloodletting, after some kind of earth-shattering revolution, starting with the downfall of either Congressman Weldon or Spokesman Swiergosz. Whatever the truth is, this is something that shouldn’t be decided by the usual red-versus-blue cockfighting that answers all questions nowadays. He-said-she-said situations like this, raised with regard to things that aren’t completely unknown to all parties involved, represent a contempt for the truth in the higher eschelons of our leadership. For this, the blame must ultimately rest with the electorate. We shouldn’t be tolerating this.
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