Public Integrity

I have to admit first that I currently vote Democratic although I consider myself an Eisenhower Republican. The party has made an about face since his time, however. I didn’t vote for George W. Bush either time he ran, and I have a bias that Florida and the Supreme Court gave him the election in 2000, and that election fraud, particularly in Ohio, gave him the election in 2004.

My reasons for not voting for W the first time are probably silly. I couldn’t vote for a man who couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t vote for a man who had no lips. As I say, pretty silly. And I knew voting against him was a lost cause in 2004 because we just don’t switch presidents in the middle of a way, all things being equal. And somehow things were more than equal.

When terrorists demolished the World Trade Center, I felt violated, horrified, and strangely disconnected because little really seemed to change in my life except that flying was more arduous than it had been previously. My blood pressure went up, I’m sure, because my son Derek (you can read about that in early blog entries) was in the Navy as Communications Officer at NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain, since closed. He talked to all the bigwigs, Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, that day and on the orders of his supervisor grounded the commercial airlines for the following few days while we regrouped. I was terrified we would lose Derek too.

In the weeks and months following September 11, 2001, the propaganda machine shifted into overdrive. When I was in college, propaganda was a way of putting the best face on facts. Since then, however, it has become outright lies.

That is why I am not surprised at the following report issued jointly by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, both of which I checked out. They are independent think tanks without any bias except independence and integrity. That is to say, they are funded by neither liberals nor conservatives. They merely seek the truth.

Because of copyright laws, I am unable to replicate the report here. The highlights, however, are that Bush and seven of his top advisors conspired to lie (over 700 times) about Iraq’s involvement in the destruction so of the Twin Towers so we could invade Iraq. The media, sadly, didn’t investigate the lies and thereby became implicit in the current quicksand we call the War in Iraq.

I have a masters degree in journalism. I am an American. But I feel ashamed that we allowed our “leaders” to fool us with their emotional blackmail and outright lack of integrity. They pushed us into a totally unnecessary war. They pushed us into quicksand and we are slowly drowning.

Read the entire report at Center for Public Integrity site.

As always I am interested in your comments. And since I am housebound after breaking my ankle, I especially need a little intellectual stimulation.