Ethel the Blog

In the midst of the predictable batches of email attachments from the usual dittohead mouth-breathers “explaining” how the sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused solely by the mental deficiencies of the darkies, Greg Palast supplies an explanation that actually involves the facts.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 monthly payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. The Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinning’s, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.

Palast then relates how the cuffs were slapped on Spitzer on that very same day. And who says the ruling olasses donn’t have a great sense of humor? Given various revelations over that last couple of years about prostitution rings in Washington D.C. - hell, make that over the last 200 years - it’s basically a matter of prosecutorial discretion as to who gets pinched.

In case anyone’s confused: $200 billion of taxpayer money is being given to bail out the companies of those who deliberately engaged in fraudulent loan practices. The former homeowners, the stockholders, and many of the lower-level employees who implemented the details of the fraud (rather than lose their jobs for failing to follow marching orders) are all losing out in various degrees. That is, the former head of Countrywide will be “punished” for his knowing (that is, unless he was the stupidest man in history) fraud with nearly 3/4 of a trillion dollars, while everybody else is “rewarded” with, variously, the loss of a home, a job, or a retirement income. And yet the only response some proto-sentients can offer to these basic facts is to blame the victims, a group which, ironically enough, includes themselves.

A judge deciding that NBC should allow Dennis Kucinich to participate in a debate in Nevada - as per a previous agreement apparently amounting to a binding contract - has been predictably met with a braying chorus of accusations of “judicial activisim” from the usual suspects. I’ve realized for quite a while that “judicial activism” is nothing more than a code phrase for “that’s ideologically unacceptable so I’ll throw a hissy fit,” although I’ve avoided the issue ever since the Shiavo case. I’ve never quite recovered from the utterly blank and uncomprehending stare I received after asking a normally rational, intelligent person - after they’d been snarling about the evil judicial activist judge who’d made a decision not consonant with that week’s RNC official talking points - just which law the Republican judge had overridden in his decision.

Glenn Greenwald nicely sums up the reality behind the “judicial activism” chorus:

“All day we’re going to be subjected to commentary about “activist judges.” That term has long ceased to mean anything other than “judges who issue rulings that compel outcomes which conservatives dislike.” Perhaps the most egregious instance was when leading conservative activists were pathetically applying that term to the Republican Southern Baptist state court judge presiding over the Terry Schiavo case by faithfully applying clear mandates of Florida state law — all because they wanted a different outcome, regardless of what the law required.

The systematic erosion of the rule of law in America has many aspects, and one significant one is that conservatives have been trained that they have the right to have judges issue rulings that produce outcomes they like, and when that doesn’t happen, it means the judicial process is flawed and corrupt. Put another way, those marching under the banner purportedly opposed to “judicial activism” have been taught that they are entitled to have courts ignore the law in order to ensure the outcomes they want.

What else could possibly explain how someone can be convinced that they are in a position to condemn a judicial ruling without bothering to learn anything about the laws and legal issues in play? Hence: Bush should be able to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants and any judge who rules that — under the law — he can’t, is guilty of “judicial activism.” They’ve been trained to believe they’re entitled to have judges give them the outcomes they want, and when that doesn’t happen, that alone is grounds for proclaiming that the courts and judges are not just corrupt, but illegitimate.

Yep, another lame-assed attempt to flog this cadaver back to life.

I think I’ve got it figured out. The posting jones was greatly diminished when I got that anger thing largely dissipated a few years back. Perhaps I just need to schedule a regular time in the evenings - say, between beer 3 and 4 - to post whatever inanity was shiny enough to get my attention that day. We’ll attempt yet another restart - not unlike those who attempt to stop smoking on a quasi-regular basis - by whorishly and shamelessly imitating a widely used blog space filler.

This particular(ly) strained plot contrivance was precipitated by my first use of the iTunes shuffle feature today, which was itself precipitated (yes, there’s been a lot of rain here in Tejas lately) by my typical incapability of actually choosing what I want to hear from the 70 GB or so of music I’ve got stored for a - you guessed it - rainy day.

So here’s my initial attempt to prove how much more retro-hip and obscure I am than thou.

• “About Her” - Malcolm McLaren - Kill Bill 2 OST - A slowed and slightly fuzzified remake of the Zombies’ (aka Rod Argent’s) “She’s Not There” as performed by the man who gave John Lydon well more than his requisite 15 minutes (or at least as performed by whomever Malcolm was trying to make the next John Lydon).
• “So Sad About Me” - Cowboy Mouth - All You Need Is Live - I ordered 5 of their albums the morning after I first encountered them at the Galveston version of Mardi Gras, at which I also first saw the Blue Oyster Cult live. I can’t think of many other newly discovered bands that categorize themselves as rock and/or roll that I’ve enjoyed as much in the last decade.
• “Since I Met You” - Junior Brown - Live in Sarasota, FL, 2000 - A fine sounding boot of a little-known Texas treasure, with this track featuring his wife - a former guitar student of his who really impressed Prof. Brown.
• “Evonce (alt. take)” - Thelonious Monk - Complete Blue Note Recordings - Monk. Aaaaah.
• “All the Things You Are” - Connie Evingson - Some Cats Know - An obscure Minnesota-based jazz singer every bit as good as several others whose fame generally well exceeds their talent. Her version of this chestnut is as enjoyable as I’ve heard, and I’ve heard a few.
• “Undercover of the Night” - Rolling Stones - Undercover - The title tune from a fairly obscure album, at least for these lads. I’m not much of a fan of their albums after this, maintaining that the Keith Richards X-Pensive Winos albums are the best Stones albums in the last 20 years.
• “Pedal Point Blues” - Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um - One of the lesser tunes from my favorite Mingus album. This - like much of the Mingus output - is evocative of the business of the big city.
• “Sultans of Swing” - Dire Straits - Coming as it did in the midst of the cacophony of beeps, chirps and buzzes characterizing the early 80s new wave period, this was - well - music to my ears. I remember mistaking it for the next Men at Work single. Or was it the other way around?
• “When the Spell is Broken” - Richard Thompson - Live 3/7/91 - A solo Thompson boot, wherein he yet again proves the over-ranked pretender status of most others in the singer-songwriter genre.
• “At the Crossroads” - Sir Douglas Quintet - An early piece from Texas giant Doug Sahm. My first experience of Sahm was when I bought a vinyl album of his back in the late 1970s, mainly (solely) because Dylan guested. This is in my Sahm top five.

This will get even more obscure when I get a 500GB disc to hang off this thing and fill it will my krautrock, jazz and African music collections. As for the shuffle thing, I’m hooked. It saves my thinking juices for more important things like being really clever on a blog.

Undernews excerpts a piece by Jacob Sullum at Reason explaining how Texas gleefully one-ups the insanity of the Holy and Forever War on Drugs.  Don’t bet against Governor Goodhair doing nothing about this.  Hell, don’t bet against that empty suit trying to transmogrify Brown’s sentence into a death penalty.

The Drug War Chronicle reports that pressure is building for Texas Gov. Rick Perry to commute the sentence of Tyrone Brown, who was sentenced to life in prison for smoking pot. In 1990, when he was 17, Brown took part in a $2 robbery in which the victim was not physically injured, a crime for which he received 10 years of probation. A few weeks later, he tested positive for marijuana, and the judge not only revoked his probation but inexplicably re-sentenced him to a life term. Now, after local and national media attention . . . Perry has been urged to commute Brown’s sentence not only by outraged citizens but by Dallas District Attorney Bill Hill, Sheriff Louie Valdez, and even the sentencing judge, Keith Dean, who is no longer in office. . . The Dallas Morning News contrasted Dean’s ridiculously harsh treatment of Brown, a poor black teenager, with the lenience he showed a wealthy white guy, John Alexander Wood, who received a 10-year suspended sentence for killing a prostitute. When Wood repeatedly tested positive for cocaine, Dean did not send him to jail, let alone give him a life sentence. Instead he arranged things so Wood didn’t have to take drug tests anymore.

Chris Floyd offers a bit of background on the folks spinning the Litvinenko story.

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Of course, one of the chief obstacles in assessing the situation is the fact that almost everything we knew about the case for weeks was spoonfed to the media by the most elite PR operation in Britain. Almost from the moment that Litvinenko fell ill, he disappeared behind a phalanx of handlers paid for by his patron, Boris Berezovsky, the fugitive Russian billionaire and shadowlands operator par excellence. To handle – and generate – the publicity surrounding the incident, Berezovsky called on his old friend, Baron Bell of Belgravia, who, back when he was just plain old Tim Bell, served as the private propaganda chief for Margaret Thatcher, as Sourcewatch reports. The baron has also flacked for disgraced media mogul Conrad Black, disgraceful media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the mechanism set up by the Bush Administration to eviscerate Iraq.

(Speaking of the CPA, UK investigators now say they’ve found traces of Polonium 201, the radioactive isotope believed to have killed Litvinenko, in the London offices of Erinys, a private security company. As I noted in CounterPunch back in December 2003, Bush’s CPA gave Erinys’ Iraqi branch – formed as a joint venture with business cronies and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad Chalabi – $40 million to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land. This has grown into a much larger stashn, not to mention an armed force of 16,000 men – something of a militia, one might say. The freebooters also bagged big money riding shotgun for Halliburton and Bechtel in those palmy CPA days of yore. And as the Guardian reports, Erinys is also active in Russia. You pull at one string in the shadowlands, and a whole tangled nest of other dark business starts shaking somewhere else.)

The leaping lord’s PR shop has also represented Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, another victim of a spectacularly ham-handed poisoning laid at the Kremlin’s door. Yet another client was former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose “miraculous” 1996 election victory – in the face of single-digit approval ratings – was engineered by a small group of oligarchs who were later given carte blanche to plunder Russia’s state-owned enterprises and vast natural resources for private profit. The acknowledged leader of this clique – which had muscled its way to riches and power in the brutal, Hobbesian free-for-all that characterized the Yeltsin years – was of course a certain Boris Berezovsky.

As one of the prime vetters of political aspirants in the Yeltsin court, Berezovsky was instrumental in bringing the obscure but presumably biddable ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin to power. But Putin had a clique of his own, based in the security organs – and soon the oligarchs found themselves out-muscled, on the receiving end of the state machinery they had manipulated for so long. Most fled abroad, where they’d stashed their billions; some were jailed. Berezovsky, charged with embezzlement and money laundering, repaired to sumptuous digs in London and environs, there to become Putin’s most ferociously outspoken critic. He also found new friends in high places – including Neil Bush, George W.’s scandal-ridden brother. Berezovsky is one of the backers of Neil’s “educational software” company, which peddles a dumbed-down “interactive teaching” system called COW to public school systems loath to risk their federal funding by rejecting a First Family boondoggle.

This then is the team that controlled the flow of information during the three agonizing weeks it took Litvinenko to die. They set out the basic storyline that was followed, with scarcely a variation, by all the leading UK papers and most of the world media. The Cold War had come again, we were told: a bold dissident against the tyrannical Putin regime had been assassinated in the streets of London by the undead KGB, wielding strange poisons concocted in secret laboratories. (All this while the latest James Bond movie was having its gala premiere!) A carefully composed photograph of the martyr was released by the baronial PR outfit, and quickly became the global emblem of the case. This is what Putin has done, Litvinenko was said to have said: see his evil handiwork with your own eyes.

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Wikipedia takes all the fun out of life. Here I was all hepped up to start a list of canines in literature - prompted by Robert Grudin’s Book (even though the author unforgiveably offs the marvelously named Doppler therein) - when I find a huge list already in place at that repository of all knowledge (real or otherwise).  Ah well, if anyone has any further suggestions that aren’t on that list - or even if they are on the list and you want to say something about it - then have at it.

James Yeager entertains us with how Junior’s going to get rid of the evil Cheney cyborg.

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In current presidential history, Bush Minor is too shallow for persuasion, too unsubtle for domination. What he likes is having the fix put in for so long in advance that he thinks nobody’s going to notice it’s been fixed. Like being a Yale legacy, or being let into and then skipping out on the National Guard.

So when Bush finally realizes he needs to persuade Cheney to leave for the good of the country, it will be done an entirely different way. But rest assured Cheney’s defrocking cannot fail to reveal the kind of sly idiocy this administration customarily mistakes for fancy footwork.

About the best thing Bush can do to appear to refurbish his pluperfect irrelevance is to dump Cheney and appoint John McCain vice president. Safe move, Senate’s already gone Democratic. One less vote isn’t going to matter.

McCain’s the heir-apparent already. That’s his reward for caving into Bush on torture and warrantless wiretapping while giving the dimmer bulbs among the media glare the impression of not having done so.

Cheney’s going to have to go as part of the Iraq policy realignment anyway. The one that dare not speak its name. The one that takes until the next presidential term because the situation is so ineffably infundibulated that the best bipartisan military and civilian minds in America will have to take that long to work it out. By comparison, extracting an army in the field from the midst of civil war took Napoleon the better part of four years, and he at least had the merit of being a military genius.

The only real question for now is, do they need to pull a Bill Casey on Cheney or not? Some will recall that new Defense guy Bob Gates was Casey’s deputy CIA Director when Casey had a sudden brain aneurysm the day before he was supposed to testify to Congress about linking Reagan to the Iran-Contra scandal of fragrant memory.

Completely unexpected. Nobody had any idea. Why, Casey was in perfect health. Old, but, you know, perfect health. Took one for the Gipper, perhaps.

Well, Cheney’s never been in perfect health since his first heart attack, much less his last one. So if he disappeared into an ambulance and failed to emerge vigorously on the other end of the ride nobody, nobody, would be surprised.

It may not come to that. Cheney may prefer to take his dour and impervious self-righteousness back to Wyoming where he can drunkenly shoot endangered species, pollute his ranch, and count his money all he wants.

But there are two kinds of craziness infesting the top of the Bush-Cheney cluster-failure. One of them is Cheney’s insistence that he alone interprets the world correctly and anybody who says different is a sissy. The other is Bush’s stark operating principle that words have no inherent meaning.

The divorce from reality that these habits of thought engender is so severe that you have to wonder if their practitioners were ever married to actuality at all. Or even went out on dates.

Given the complex psycho-daddy relationship Cheney has with Bush Minor, it is not too far-fetched to think Bush may want to remove Cheney for non-political reasons too. Remember what the prison shrink says to the condemned murderer Williams in the Lemmon/Matthau remake of The Front Page? The shrink asks Williams to tell him about his youth; Williams says it was wonderful, happy, no tension. “Completely normal childhood.” The shrink says, “I see. So you wanted to kill your father and sleep with your mother.”

Since we know nobody on the face of God’s good earth wants to sleep with Bar, and Poppy still has Secret Service protection, taking out Father-Figure might be the only avenue to psychic relief left for poor little Georgie, especially if he hasn’t already started drinking again.

Nobody as lethargically concerned with his legacy as Bush is could omit an opportunity to wipe away the appearances of the past and substitute the illusion of progress while, in fact, altering nothing of substance whatsoever. The frat boy who would do anything crude to be the center of attention at parties hasn’t changed.

McCain’s replacing Cheney. Don’t know how, don’t know when. But it makes more sense than the war in Iraq, tax cuts for the rich, legislation for sale, or gay Republicans. Oh, but wait. Maybe that’s why it won’t happen after all. Makes too much sense.

Be sure to also read the priceless LBJ anecdote at the start of the piece.

Paul William Roberts tells us what the desperate losers of the recent election are currently up to in the Middle East.

…According to the Iraqi newspaper Al- Quds al-Arabi, James Baker, the Bush family’s Mr. Fixit , recently met with one of Saddam Hussein’s lawyers in Amman, Jordan, and told him that the former deputy prime minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, would be released from detention by December in order to negotiate with the US on behalf of factions of the Iraqi resistance movement still controlled by old Ba’ath Party leaders. Sources in Jordan tell me that the first stage of such negotiations has indeed already taken place. Two weeks ago, Aziz was whisked from his jail cell and, along with other representatives of Iraq’s Sunni Resistance, taken for three days’ of secret discussions in Amman with senior US officials. It is heartening to note that this course of action was advised by the Atlantic Free Press three weeks ago. Aziz and his colleagues are currently discussing America’s proposals with the divisional resistance leadership, whose response and counter-offers they will present to Washington early next month.

Jordan’s Crown Prince Hassan tells me, furthermore, that Condoleeza Rice made a personal appeal to the Gulf Cooperation Council last month to act as intermediaries between the US and the armed Sunni resistance, not including Iraqi al-Qaeda leaders. Rice evidently joked during the closed-door meeting that “if Donald Rumsfeld could hear me now he would wage war against me fiercer and hotter than he waged in Iraq.”

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We’re told that Al-Maliki’s going to be sacrificed at the altar of expediency and the puppet government will be reorganized in a more Sunni-friendly way.

Next up, a view of Iran other than the subtle “evil purveyors of evil terrorism and even eviler further evils” promulgated by the cabal and their media whores. Geez, who knew that those not blessed by the one and only creator with U.S. citizenship had motivations other than hating freedom, world domination, and making sandwiches out of U.S. babies?

…In this, as in all Middle Eastern political poker these days, Teheran holds better cards than Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Baghdad. While state media ply us with tales of Iran’s profligacy as chief arms merchant to violent dissent, the real story is that of Iran’s restraint. There were larger shoulder-launched missiles to supply Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon – ones capable of reaching every city in Israel – yet Teheran chose not to make them available. There is an awful lot more that the Iranian military could provide to Iraqi resistance groups, too, yet to date it is the Russians, via Syria, who have provided most of the weaponry. Why is Iran so coy?

One could speculate that the Islamic Republic will not play its hand until Iran’s air force includes nuclear missiles; or one could theorize that the Iranian clergy still hopes to extend national influence into Iraq along religious lines, without force. But no one in Iran is going to let us see what cards his country holds because they aren’t playing poker there at all, they’re playing chess, the national game. Among its many shortcomings, the DC Situation Room lacks a really good chess player — which is a pity, since chess is all they play in there.

Israel also used to display a blistering strategic chess game, where now all we see is a kosher ham-fisted version of checkers. Particularly in response to the elegant gambit played from Teheran, whose President Ahmadinejad is used like a Queen to carry out showily distracting but inconsequential assaults into enemy terrain, while the Bishops position themselves for far more lethal operations.

The real power in Teheran is an oligarchy linked to oil and interwoven with senior clerics yet essentially secular in its goals. Your media don’t bother you with this reality, however, for reasons best known to themselves. To retain the status quo, however, the oligarchs must placate the impoverished masses with a myth of spiritual warfare in which Iran fights for God against Satan. God has just awarded one of Iran’s citizens the deeds to Satan’s embassy in Teheran in lieu of a cash payment for the fine imposed by a clerical court for wrongful imprisonment – so the war is going well! At least no one in Teheran’s corridors of power actually believes this yarn, though, while Washington is infested with religious psychopaths who seriously (or rather comically) think they’re up against a guy with horns who has set himself up as the Competition.

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Finally, some fun comments about the ham-fisted pyschopaths who’ve been engaging in what passes for U.S. diplomacy in the fading days of empire.

… The day America admits it no longer produces diplomats able to hold their own in a serious global match will be the day it might be allowed back into the world community with observer credentials. Henry Kissinger was a better butcher than he was diplomat, but at least he knew how to sit down and deal. As Saddam Hussein will tell you — since The Godfather is his favorite movie – when the other mob leaders think Sonny has taken over the family, they start a war. Putting John Bolton in the UN is like making The Terminator President: a very bad idea someone in Washington will always be enamored with until an even worse idea occurs to them.

From the comments over at Tiny Revolution (by some chap named Ted):

…I find it hard to believe that the government lied compellingly and abnormally, because you’d have to be some kind of naive to think the government tells the truth and thus we’re surprised that, gasp, lies on occasion.

During 2001/2002 we put a lot of men and equipment in the field. I saw a LOT of convoys on the highway to destinations unknown and asked myself, hmm — where’s this all going? Will the rotational costs be justified if it’s not used? If it’s not used won’t it indicate weak leadership to send 500K men to the middle east only to have them return six-months later? Won’t it be viewed that accepting any compliance by Saddam would be postponing the problem (like his dad did 10 years prior). Wouldn’t this be used as an excuse to clean house once an for all? Are we apt to let the UN set our security policy because they think we’re unilateral? How would THAT play with the average American? Don’t we have a right to preemptive war?

A lot of coded reporting occurred that indicated precisely what was going to happen, and yet, political forces both on the right and left told us that it was undecided if we’d go to war. Only the clueless believed that. I’m sorry if characterizing it so offends anyone.

People want to be lied to obliquely because it absolves them of responsibility and provides plausible deniability. And now we can all deny involvement or prior knowledge of the war (except for that pesky Google). But look, when the PRESS is being patriotic, you know that you’re going to get a pack of lies on a range of issues. And the press is still being patriotic vs. truthful because, well, because it’s owned by large media with no further responsibility other than selling us crap. Our choice is to be comfortable by following the patriotic press or uncomfortable by demanding truth from the press and ourselves.

We’ll go through this exercise again after Iran.