17 May 2009

Sunday Blogging.

I start off on a lighter note. One man's idea of what is hip, why it's hip and why it secretly might not be. How to Impress a Hipster.

Ok, with that out of the way, I would like to say that Rachel Maddow is the most informative, principled news person on any network. This isn't saying much when you look at her peers (Glen Beck, O'Reilly, etc.) but she is pretty much in a class of her own. In case you haven't been watching recently, she had a segment on Thursday about all the new information about torture coming out. Watch it here. If you don't feel like watching one of the most important 15 minutes of television to be aired in the past month I'll break it down for you. We tortured. We tortured people who were already fully cooperating with the American government. We tortured people who were already fully cooperating with the American government in order to get Iraqis to lie so that the Bush administration could score some political points and not be outright lying when they claimed that Iraqi officials had said there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. People who had knowledge on this subject (the people we ignored) knew that this connection was simply illogical. No one who interviewed these people wanted to torture, no one suggested it could be useful, the order came from Cheney's office that they should be tortured and asked specifically about this connection. There is still no clear reason why America invaded Iraq. It is clear that the invasion was extremely desirable for extremely powerful people. Was it oil? Was it corporate greed? Was it revenge? Was it a misplaced sense of duty as the world's policeman? Perhaps it is simply what this country does. This is an extremely dark and shameful chapter in America's history. It already happened, but the regular people, the citizens of this nation, are just reading it now. The saddest part, the most shameful footnote may be that most people don't even care enough to pick up the book.

3 comments:

  1. The first link was great; the second one was depressing, but I can't say that I'm terribly surprised, which makes it even more depressing. Have you heard about Cheney's assassination squad? (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/11/executive-assassination-r_n_174035.html) It seems like all those ridiculous things conspiracy theorists used to babble about are turning out to be true.

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  2. The more we learn about Cheney, the creepier this guy gets. And he was already the champion of creepiness in American politics. Being a conspiracy theorist seems kind of to be a way of writing off someone's opinion or idea without considering it. If anything we should learn to listen to everything and judge it based on fact and not whether it meshes with the narrative we've been force fed. We probably landed on the moon, we definitely didn't get everyone involved in the assassination of JFK or MLK, and 9/11 was probably planned by Muslim extremists. We give up when the explanation is more complex than "These evil dude(s) did it." Maybe we get bored with the questions (though some people never do eg conspiracy theorists) or maybe there's an indirect pressure applied to most public figures to simply stop questioning. And I don't know if there is really anything we can do about it.

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