Leaking on the leaker

Sex by surprise? OK, sex with two Swedish girls a third of my age would indeed be a surprise for this old man; for sure and maybe a fatal one, but it's not about me or likely to be, sad to say. It's about politics and money and power and that's no surprise at all.

So no matter what your feelings about Julian Assenge might be (mine are solidly into the Who Cares territory) you have to smile when information as to the actual charges against him are leaked to the public. That's if you love irony.

Was he sat up in a "honey trap?" I don't really care, he went into this with his eyes open and he is sort of an adult, but then his chief accuser did go on sleeping with him in her apartment for weeks and never asked him to leave. One has to wonder just where the "Surprise" was for her unless it was in E-mails leaked to Assenge's lawyer suggesting the quest for money was behind it, but then she may only have wanted the man to be tested for STDs, says The Guardian. Who knows, who cares? We're looking for scandal and a prop for our prejudices. The truth is boring.

Now can we get back to the war on Christmas?

Relief is just a leak away

There's nothing like a good leak. No, I'm not talking about beer drinking or kidneys. Yes, it may still be all about indecent exposure, but exposure of a different kind of naughty bits. God bless the leaker.

Remember "Climate gate;" that clumsy journo-speak title for some e-mails between British Climatologists that after a bit of redaction seemed to be saying that the evidence for Global warming was fabricated by a great worldwide network of rogue paleoclimatologists plotting to be characters from a James Bond movie? Well the hoax may be on the other foot now, so to speak, but you won't hear it from the folks at Fox who spread it around the planet. You won't find the Fox admitting or mentioning that NASA data confirmed a rise in temperature quite independently and in irrefutable scientific rigor.

You won't find Fox admitting to error of any kind much less to deliberately lying, whether its hoaxing us about scientific data or showing the fake and fraudulent video that ruined ACORN. I admit, those e-mails had me going for a while but that was before the new data and the new revelations. Even Andrew Breitbart publicly washed the egg off his face, but Fox? Well, you decide.

It was all too easy to call Julian Assenge a "terrorist" or call for his summary execution, but I'm curious to see the outcome of some recent leaks showing just how Fox slants the news.

"Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data... we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question,"

said Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon in a leaked e-mail in response to correspondent Wendell Goler's report that that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization data again confirmed that the 2000 - 2009 decade has been the warmest worldwide on record, not just warmer than the previous one.

Like anything Fox gets paid to misrepresent, conflicting data must always be impugned by the " some say" or "people say" trick as though those "critics" weren't simply Roger Ailes or Bill Sammon or a Fox sponsor or most of all the Republican party. When the data conflicts with the politics, always mention "the critics." That's unslanted journalism, Fox style.

And when something you don't like sounds good, change the name. Take the "Public Option," for instance. According to Republican pollster and Fox man Frank Lutz,

"if you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split, if you call it the 'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it."

Public sounds popular; sounds democratic; sounds like the people want it and polls show that they do, so let's call it "the Government option" said Sammon to Sean Hannity in another leaked e-mail. "Great idea" said Sean.

Let's also claim that the "government option" would be "sponsored by the government, although in fact, the proposed public option would have funded the program with the premiums paid by enrolees - just like private insurance. So we need even stronger language - let's call it the "Government run option" and drape it in the Soviet flag. Never mind that we're lying, whatever serves the Party, that's what we'll say. That's journalism, Fox style.

Waiter, there's a terrorist in my tea.

"In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it."

-Ron Paul-

What is it about Florida? Is it as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, that since it's the lowest point on the map of the US, everything loose wound up down here?

We may be no more fatuous than the Rest of the country in blabbering about our "freedom" and how everyone in the world is jealous of it and how every military exploit is about freedom and every casualty is a sacrifice for freedom and that this freedom is the result of our foreign wars rather than our constitutional law, but we sure look strange to that supposedly jealous planet when we agitate that more and more of it be taken away from us -- in the name of freedom.

Speaking of loose things floating around in the bilges of America, Florida Representative elect Allen West, soon to represent the 22nd district, who identifies with that nebulous assemblage of misfits and nitwits called the Tea Party, seems to be all in favor of censoring the press despite all his tea soaked and treacly rhetoric about constitutional restraints on government power.

" . . . I think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled him to do this and also supported him and applauding him [Julian Assenge] for the efforts. So that's kind of aiding and abetting of a serious crime."

No, he's not talking about reporting troop positions or exposing covert agents, he's talking about embarrassing the administration as "a serious crime." That's the same administration Tea Party folks have been waving guns at and making threats at and calling tyrannical, Marxist and illegal.

Yes, it's been all too hard for most of us to tell exactly what message the Tea Party people are bringing to the party, and this message of government for government's sake; government by, for and of the Executive branch and military authority and damn the constitution, smells more like plain old exaggerated nationalism and authoritarianism than tea.

One of the ways "the terrorists" won, is that domestic authoritarians posing as libertarians can simply identify anything that threatens them: things like the truth, for instance, as "Terrorism" and make it a crime. Things like identifying high crimes and high criminals and the kind of lies and manipulations of truth that get people killed and bankrupt economies. Revealing a crime; a politically motivated burglary, for example, becomes, by the logic of Tea, "aiding and abetting a serious crime" and "terrorism" while actually aiding and abetting by hiding it or obstructing justice becomes. . . what, freedom?

Is West a moderate compared to Uncle Mike Huckabee who demands summary execution for Assenge? Palin, Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and even CNN are calling him a "terrorist" and telling us not only that we can't handle the truth - we don't deserve it and the government doesn't owe it to us. It's all about freedom of course - and all of this from people calling Obama a "tyrant." So whatever the Tea party is selling, I think we can dispense with the idea that it has anything to do with less powerful government, a government restrained by law; anything to do with a government of the people, responsible to the people and most of all, anything to do with freedom other than to garble it's meaning.

Free to die

Am I joking? Well of course that dent in my cheek is from my tongue being there for so long. I'm nearly always joking, but sometimes the joke is serious. Sometimes the joke is much more laughable than anything I can make up.

You know, when I pay money to Blue Cross, unless I'm sick, all that money goes to pay other people's bills. They can decide whether to pay mine or not, so to an extent they decide whether I'm free to live or die and the deciding factor has much to do with how much money they want to make. I don't sit on the board of directors I can't influence the decision even if my medical condition gives me time to try. Call my congressman who depends on the largess of some HMO? Yes, I'm joking there too. No, under our great system we call freedom, I either cough up the cash or I'm free to die and thanks to the Bush family values, I probably can't file for bankruptcy protection against corporate leg breakers.

Why the holy hell is America so in love with that, that they won't consider a better safer and cheaper alternative? The answer is the real joke here -- because of corporate mind control and political lobbying that we also pay for with our insurance premiums: because we're trained to bark like Pavlov's dogs when Glenn Beck says "Socialism" when some bumper sticker mocks "Obamacare."

I get taxed big time to educate other people's children. If there's a benefit to me, it's not a direct, immediate one, but it's a benefit because the country's survival depends on it. ( note to self - they're trying to get rid of public education too) If I get taxed to pay for other people's medical expenses, there's a more direct benefit to me because although I'm not going back to first grade, I am going to die sooner or later and I'd prefer it to be later if you don't mind too much.

The cheapest and most efficient way of providing health care is through single payer government administered insurance like our VA system provides. Anything else is something less.

But OK, I'm joking, sure -- but you know, the real joke is that we hate the concept of government so much we'll ignore that a healthy nation is in the public interest as much as a literate nation and an invasion-proof nation. The joke is that we hate the reality of civilization so much we'll spend more to stay alive even as our civilization fades, our competitiveness wanes and even if we, our countrymen and their children die unnecessarily and prematurely in the process.

And seriously, the attitude that every man is for himself and what's mine is mine is what freedom is about, is a sick and malignant joke and an idea with no history of success. The idea that I benefit from civilization but owe nothing for its upkeep is a tragic joke well worthy of being an epitaph.

That we worry more about company profits for others than about giving our children a chance to grow up means something ugly about America and about Americans, and the older I get, the more of a sick, mean spirited, ugly old whore my country seems.

The constitution disallows it? The constitution declares itself to be there to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Is being on your own, helpless and hapless in an uncaring wilderness and at the greedy whim of some businessman really liberty? Is it civilization? So the libertarians and corporate fascists insist. That's a joke. Laugh if you can.

We justify a massive military to protect us from something less certain than disease and we won't justify spending less money than we spend now to protect us against what the army can't because spending less is spending too much? That's a better joke than I can make. That's a joke worthy of Mr. Beck who now is telling us that if the government can take poison of grocery shelves, they can control our lives. Are you laughing yet?

Who is the joker when we hear that your kid has to die in the interests of my "financial liberty" to spend every damned penny I make for my own benefit alone and maximize my corporate dividends without any thought to the responsibilities of civilization and its maintenance?

Who is perverting the concept of liberty by telling us a sick and helpless man is "free" because he can't afford medicine - that he can't work because he's sick and can't get well because he can't work? Well, I guess it's me if you listen to the Libertarian flim-flam about "Obamacare."

Yeah, it's all a joke and the punch line is some kid with leukemia condemned to die because his dad lost his job to India so that some corporation could make more money. Somehow, I'm not laughing. Somehow I'm angry as hell. I don't know about you.

Pro-Life, but Anti-Logic

You know, sometimes, your junkmail can provide hours of fun. Or at least brief moments of humor.

For example, I get emails from a group calling themselves "Americans for Life," a particularly humorless bunch of irony-deprived pedants (or at least one pedant – I have no evidence that there’s anybody in this group except for Jonathan Ball, the purported author of all these emails).

Anyway, today’s message from Mr Ball is a fascinating note entitled

The Depravity of Planned Parenthood

Now, think about that statement for just a second. Apparently, family planning is depraved; you should never take control of your own life or responsibility for your breeding habits – God wants you to breed like dogs in heat, dropping a litter of puppies every year.

And to be honest, in the end, that's exactly what they believe. Why do you think that so many fundie families involve eight or ten kids?

Dear Bill,

As Christmas approaches, I find myself full of joy and appreciation of the many blessings God has bestowed upon me and my family.

He always starts off friendly, but it invariably goes downhill quickly.

But an email I received recently has greatly upset me.

An Americans for Life supporter informed me recently of Planned Parenthood’s Christmas campaign, “Choice on Earth.”

Well, it’s a cute marketing campaign. Why does this upset you? Because their PR people are better than yours? (And yes, the semi-random use of underlining is entirely a stylistic choice on his part. It’s like “Underscore Tourette’s” or something.)

You see, this Christianity-mocking campaign hopes to spread their message of "choice" by seeking donations to make abortion more available in 2011.

In years past, Planned Parenthood even sold “Choice on Earth” Christmas cards and t-shirts as a fundraising gimmick.

This has left me deeply disturbed.

Aw, Jonny, I think you’re giving entirely too much credit to this email - I'm thinking you were disturbed wa-a-ay before this.

The Abortion Lobby would have you and I believe that the best choice for poor, unwed teenage mothers is to end the life of their child rather than facing hardship.

That it is better for these unborn children to be killed than face a rough childhood.

Well... yes, actually. Don’t you want people to live by the words of the Bible?

“And I declared that the dead, who had already died,
are happier than the living, who are still alive.
But better than both is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3)

Oh, sorry, was that rude?

However, you and I have to look no further than the birth of Christ, the very reason for the celebration of Christmas, to see why every child, no matter the parent’s situation, deserves a chance at life.

You see, Mary was young and unwed at the time of her pregnancy. She was forced to give birth to Jesus in a stable and use a feeding trough as a cradle. This was far from ideal.

How could a child born into such a situation ever grow up to be anything worthwhile?

It’s a fascinating argument. Of course, one counter position might be that in April of 1889, a child was born to Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl. But that might be considered an unreasonable attitude. Plus, it's in direct violation of Godwin’s Law, and I'm already in trouble with the Internet Police. So we’ll just terminate that thought; let it die a’borning, so to speak.

Ball goes on for a while after that, yammering about the sanctity of life (something rarely found in nature, but we’ll move on), and then to his main point (and again, it’s underlined, just because he can).

Planned Parenthood must be defunded to force the closure of as many abortion clinics as possible.

Which openly ignores the fact that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s annual budget covers abortion; the other 97% goes toward other health and reproductive needs for poor and underserved citizens. But that might be too much honesty for Mr Ball to handle.

And then, of course, he begs a lot; there are three separate links to donate money to this fine organization scattered through the last four paragraphs. Really nothing new - these guys are rarely known for their imagination.

Now, as far as I can tell, Jonathan Ball's Americans for Life is entirely different from this Americans for Life - both were founded in 1996, but have different leadership, And neither one of them seems to have any connection to the older Americans United for Life. However, it's probably important to note that Black Americans for Life is entirely unrelated to any of these previous groups - they're part of the National Right to Life Coalition

I'm assuming this is some sort of "People's Front of Judea" type of situation.



(I also think I may have stumbled on to one reason why Roe v Wade is still around.)

The Book of the Jurassic: a Dino-lectical Perspective on the Recent Discussion of Obama and Race

Maybe it would be useful for a simple being from a whole 'nother epoch to write something general at this point.  You can get mad at me if you like -- I'm extinct anyway.  Still, I write with over 100 million years of collective experience in my bones, and the voices of many long-gone species traverse my tiny walnut brain.  Your choice, humans and other SWASH creatures.

Let me start by honoring Flying Junior's contribution.  Too often, we ignore our commenters.  FJ, I like the point you make beneath Sheria's post about President Obama not really having a base in the strictest sense -- there isn't a 1984-style percentage of doubleplusgood duckspeakers for Obama who are going to agree with everything he does just because it's him doing it.  That's more of a GOP phenomenon -- of some of Bush's most ardent supporters, one could say with Shakespeare's Casca, "if Caesar had / stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less."

This fact of life makes it difficult for any Democratic president -- whoever said dealing with Dems is like herding cats had it right.  Meow, meow, meow!  We are all cats, like it or not.  The point that I've been trying to make, at least indirectly, is not dissimilar to FJ's about supporting Obama: that is, it's fine to criticize the man's actions, but we might try to do it in a constructive way that doesn't make him and us look foolish and marginalized.

I keep using the term DIALECTICAL and I'm not sure it's been getting through.  One doesn't need to be a Hegelian or a Marxist or a deconstructionist or a flibbertygibbetist to get the force of that word: it can be understood generally to mean that one should try to speak in light of relevant historical and social factors.  When we hear policy statements, assess rhetoric, and so forth, we should, to the best of our abilities, try to imagine the discursive and material universe within which they have been generated.  What forces or pressures or experiences might have generated such remarks, stances, or actions?  What pressures are likely to push against them in return?  When we don't do this -- and it's unavoidable to fail in this regard sometimes -- we end up producing impoverished, unidimensional analyses and screeds.  We end up generating thought that proceeds only along a single inadequate thread, at once sowing discord and blocking consideration of other vital lines of thought.  "Historicize, historicize, historicize," said the Jurassic Dino Master, until you hear the sound of one tail thrashing.  A poverty in our own philosophy, I mean, enables the philosophy of poverty supported by our real opponents.

I believe Sheria's initial post was generated by dialectical insight -- wasn't her point that the strain of criticism she dislikes is being put out there without the necessary historical and cultural insight?  The idea isn't that white libs should all shut up and support the President blindly or else be content to be called "racists."  If the criticizers had the necessary insight, they might still be offering criticisms, but their remarks would be more likely to lead to good results instead of sowing division that helps only the Right.  They would aim their remarks at the real source of trouble: an intransigent and unpatriotic Right that makes doing anything even remotely constructive in this country a Herculean labor.  The aim is to make it more possible for President Obama to get something done, not weaken and isolate him so that he cannot.  Again, meow!  So in my view, if we read such commentaries as Sheria's at this broad dialectical level instead of responding to them as if we were being personally labeled Grand Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, good discussions will flow thereof.  If we don't, it's just a waste of time.

Healthcare Bill Under Scrutiny

Our beleaguered President has been dealt a setback of sorts on a legal challenge to the healthcare bill but it isn’t all bad news. Article HERE

US District Court Judge Henry E Hudson (a Bush appointee) ruled from his Virginia court today that Congress could not compel all citizens to purchase health insurance. He noted that:

"Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. In doing so, enactment of the [individual mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution.]”

Maybe the judge has a valid point; since Congress failed to enact nationwide, single payer health care, should they be able to compel individuals to buy private health insurance?

But then, how come states can compel individuals to buy private car insurance?

I don’t know the answer to these questions but I do know at least a couple of exemplary legal minds that hang out at the beach so I’m hoping they will put forth opinions based on their knowledge of the law of which I am woefully bereft.

Hudson did say that portions of the law that do not rest on this provision are legal and can proceed. To his credit he refused to enjoin the law and halt its implementation since it does not go into effect until 2014.

There are 25 legal challenges currently making their way through various courts. No doubt this will all end up before the SCOTUS at some point. Hudson wants to circumvent further appeals and requested it go to the Supreme Court now. He wants the White House to sign on his request saying it would benefit them to get a ruling.

I say – Not so fast…

So far four of the twenty five challenges have been ruled on or are pending. Hudson is the first to make a negative ruling on any portion of the new bill. Two other rulings in Lynchburg, VA and Michigan have ruled in favor of the provision. Florida has a case they are considering.

Seems to me the White House might fare better waiting for more rulings to bolster their argument when they do come before the Supreme Court.

What do YOU think?

Murdering Christmas

Make no mistake about it, what the insurgents are calling the War on Christmas is nothing but an assault on our religious freedom and like a dog with a bone, or a teenager on the telephone, they will not stop of their own accord.

"There are people out there who are rewriting history and people who are buying into it because they never learned history:"

said the fellow next to me at the bar, a former teacher whose wife is a Glenn Beck devotee. We nodded together like bobble head dolls although I knew full well we were envisioning the same people on the opposite side of the game. He wasn't talking about the Fox people, the Fundamentalists, the sinister bastards rearranging the sets and props and actors on the stage of history to further their lust for power. The TV Christianists doing it under the pretext of educating the public that real history is fake history -- and at this time of year, although there are many distractions, their tawdry tableau is arranged to display the fiction of the Christian Fathers who intended that this country, the United States of America, be a "Christian nation" in the same fashion as medieval Europe.

I'm not in a position to say that we ever had an educational system that didn't serve as political indoctrination. I do remember being 'taught' that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, which institution was, as it was related, moribund already -- and of course General Custer was still being presented as a hero in my youth in the segregation era, but a long standing tradition of doing wrong is hardly an argument for continuing it, to anything but a reactionary mind.

"Can you imagine it? Some people are actually offended when I say Merry Christmas!"

said the man on TV. I turned on my new battery operated portable flat screen that I just bought as part of my home hurricane preparedness kit this morning and was reminded of the fact that if one can only get broadcast TV in this area, at least half of what you can receive are Jesus channels. Note that I didn't say Christian. There's a difference. Frankly, I've never encountered offense at these words, although I have seen the Pavlovian reaction: "well you can't say that any more." Yes you can.

"Can you imagine it, some schools are having 'Winter festivals!' What do they say? Merry cold weather? I don't like cold weather, I like CHRISSSSSSSSSTMAS!"

Indeed some people look carefully in your face to gauge any hidden reaction when they say the formula. Merry Christmas, for the next week is a test, a shibboleth, not a wish. "Are you one of us?"

Yes, some people are rewriting history, making up stories about Christmas being made illegal, Christians being persecuted; about big-box home improvement stores ignoring Christmas and acknowledging holidays of nefarious, un-American religions. They're good enough at the game and we're gleefully gullible enough that we can stand in the middle of an acre of Christmas trees in the Home Depot parking lot, arms laden with the Christmas junk just purchased inside, and believe that the undoubtedly MuslimJewishAtheist owners thereof are trying to take away your right to worship trees and reindeer and a jolly fat saint. Merry Christmas -- say it often - say it ugly.

And they're not going to stop. They're not going to go away. They're not going to shut up until enough of us shout them down and make what used to be a happy season into the war they, in their sinister, apocalyptic insanity, so devoutly wish for.

Can You Handle the Truth?

Just read an op-ed piece in the New York Times by writer Ishmael Reed entitled What Progressives Don't Understand About Obama. It was an amen article, a piece with which I nodded continuously in agreement as I read it and murmured amen under my breath. To appreciate Reed's piece, read it, no summary can do it justice. He takes on the ad nauseum criticism that Present Obama is weak, ineffectual, ball less, and not tough enough to be president. A smart guy, but too nice and too concerned about keeping the peace. Too afraid to give the Republicans the ass whipping that they deserve.

I've been accused of being "nice" as in I don't want people to dislike me. Not true. I'm going to tell you up front that some of you aren't going to understand the truth that this article speaks and you may not like my attitude. See, as a black person I'm so sick and tired of white liberals who have still enjoyed the privilege of being white trying to tell a black man how to navigate in a white world.

You don't get it and you lack the humility to simply accept that you do not. Instead you attack the President as being weak, without balls, a sellout and any other demeaning, emasculating terminology that you can devise. You don't understand what it is to be black and walk in his shoes and you're too damned arrogant to listen to those of us who try and tell you.

By now, you're all upset because I've offended you. Hey, don't you want us to show our anger? Don't you have problems with me being so nice and reasonable all the time?

Don't get hung up on the mistaken notice that I'm taking the position that the president is off limits for criticism. I don't think he's perfect and I certainly have problems with some of his decisions. He and I part company when it comes to the continuation of either of our wars.

Read carefully and understand me, I'm talking about the continued hammering at his character. I'm talking about the insulting and demeaning allegations that he is less than a man, some namby- pamby smart guy who doesn't know how to be tough. What colossal ignorance and arrogance to believe that any black person could achieve what President Obama has achieved and be weak. Until you have walked in our shoes, until you have been marginalized based on the color of your skin in a culture that continues to not only openly express racism but defend its right to do so under cockeyed readings of the 1st amendment, then don't talk to me about how you think that any black person should behave.

Now, I'm going to go back to being nice. It's survival mode because if I dwell on this crap I can't leave my house. Every day that I go out I run into racism in this "colorblind" society of ours. Some days it's just the fools with the confederate flags plastered on their pickup trucks, or the monuments to the confederate dead that litter the South, but it's always something. So I'm tough and I work hard to not lose my cool because I don't have time to waste in being angry and out of control, and neither does the President.

Just say Noh

When is a journalist not a journalist? It's a simple question with a very complicated answer and that answer has little to do with credentials or degrees. It can have nothing to do with whether the reporter reports the news or creates it from air like balloon animals at some kids' birthday party.

"Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist."

said assistant Press Secretary Philip J. Crowley to assembled reporters at a December 2nd press conference. You'd expect gasps and guffaws and whispered comments like "what about Fox?" but I didn't hear any. Perhaps the disturbing idea of objective reporting was a touchy and disturbing subject for the assembled employees of corporate entertainment interests whose jobs depend on the proper slant and the ability to make headlines out of flimsy and innocuous or even non-existent words and deeds. No, says the political actor, the presidential mouthpiece, under US law, he's to be considered a "political actor."

Welcome to quantum politics, where things that are said and things that are appear and disappear like virtual particles in a vacuum; where things are sometimes their opposites and truth is relative and ephemeral.

So when political actor Glenn Beck gets teary eyed and hysterical about the proposed ability of the FDA to take poisonous, contaminated food off the shelves because if they can control what you eat, they can control your lives: so when worn out beauty queen and political actress Gretchen Carlson can pose as a news anchor and get her botoxed and painted face twisted around her rehearsed outrage that a year ago, Tulsa exercised our American freedom of religion and started calling its annual December parade a "holiday" parade, just what the hell is this journalism that it could include this foolishness but be contaminated by a hatred of secrecy and the objective of exposing a government that has villainously smiled and smiled and smiled at one lie after another while millions died in consequence.

So truth, as we can know it, is political since the concept resides in the heads of humans and not in the stones and gas and vacuum of the universe and no one can see the truth but through the filter of his mind. Just who then can we call a real journalist and why not then just make it up as we go along and accept it all as improvisational theater.

Too many people have compared it all to Kabuki, with it's exaggerated expressions and dramatizations, but it's really Bunraku, where puppets are manipulated about a darkling stage by shadowy figures dressed in black. Figures that the audience is trained not to notice.