I wish we had people like that during the Bush administration. We need the deep throats and Ellsberg's for today.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
I appreciate the sentiment. But I think it is misplaced. In sharp contrast to the situation regarding Watergate and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the deceit that led to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq - which I think is what you are referring to - was public knowledge almost from the beginning. What is different is the lack of courage to do anything about it.
But I'm sure it will all be worth it, more than 4,300 U.S. lives lost and counting, tens of thousands physically and psychologically ruined and scarred, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed, and millions displaced.
And for that price we have established a *beep* government closely allied with Iran. It's quite a bargain.
*edit: IMDb edited out Shi ite. lol
Oh, how I wish I could believe or understand that.
Actually the BS about the Iraq war was public knowledge as well. Just depended on where you got your news.
Amy: I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
it brings up an interesting point though, don't you think? I mean, the question is: did Ellsberg's revelations, combined with the Watergate scandal and the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, make it so that American became somehow de-sensitized to corruption? Did it become less sensational? Did it become "ho hum"? It seems like the only people who care about the leaks from Bradley Manning and Eric Snowden are people who are already activists.
Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'
Yeah, I think it's created this atmosphere of ambivalence and disinterest in our political process. So, no matter how bad the next scandal is, people don't get up and do anything about it. They just figure the train will keep rolling. Even with all these NSA spying revelations, you don't see people putting any real pressure on government to change things.
Amy: I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I often hear media types use the term disaffected to describe this condition. It literally means that you're unhappy with your Government, or it's leaders, and you're unwilling to support them. That's what we're doing when we sit idly by and watch corruption unfold before us without doing anything about it.
Supposedly it's harder then ever to expose corruption today. The Government, big media and large corporations have all learned lessons from Vietnam, Watergate and the Iran-Contra Scandal. As the result, they've put safeguards in place, not to ensure that these things never happen again, but rather to ensure that they don't become scandals, when they do happen.
During Watergate, Nixon sent the IRS after The Washington Post and nearly caused it to go bankrupt. This was revealed years after it happened and now many will suggest that this is why no big media will ever publish anything like the Pentagon Papers again. Many of Snowden's revelations were nothing new to the public domain, but no one seemed to care much when they were first revealed (politicians mostly looked the other way and the corporate media mentioned it as little as possible.)
One thing that will always stick with me is Colin Powell's speech to the UN, just days before the Iraq War began. The evidence he gave to support the Bush Administration's argument was allegedly the same evidence used for the Gulf War and media around the world noted this dishonesty immediately afterward (Powell would later admit this himself, but say that he didn't know it was old information at the time).
In the USA, meanwhile, our corporate media entities were all glowing with favoritism for Powell's speech and declaring it the final nail in the coffin for those who disagreed with the President's decision to invade Iraq. A day or two later, we invaded Iraq, even though we'd asked the UN to send weapons inspectors to check the evidence presented and they were still in Iraq gathering information (their report would later verify all purported evidence as false).
I watched Powell give his argument, and given the circumstances this time around, I thought it was weak, even if it were true (Powell would later say that he refused to present all the "evidence" they'd asked him to present and I don't think Powell liked any of this). If media around the world were actually reporting that the information was old, then why did our own corporate media not know? Why were they, instead, feeding the buildup to war and hammering those final nails themselves?
It's hard to blame citizens, constituents and the populace of this nation too much, when we can't even get straight information, and I think that has a lot to do with why so many are disaffected. We have Fox News telling us one thing and CNN telling us another. I don't actually see this as a bad thing, as long as one of them is telling the truth, and unfortunately, I don't think that always happens. When it does happen, the other networks tend to gang up on the one actually telling the truth.