posted March 13, 2003 at 10:12 PM MDTEarlier today I heard something interesting about the speech President George W. Bush gave at the Johnson Space Center commemorating the astronauts who died aboard STS-107 Columbia ... I watched that speech live on NASA TV ... thought it was touching. Bush talked about having visited the Space Center in better times, while Governor of Texas. The President of the United States of America lied. He lied. He made that up, during a commemoration to dead astronauts. George W. Bush never visited the Johnson Space Center while Governor, but it was a good thing to say, so he said it.
In another example of Enron-style democracy (or is it Goebbels ... did you know that Goebbels kept assuring the Germana people that the Nazi's didn't want war, that Britain was forcing the war on them?) the New York Times knows that truth is a powerful thing, and it's there responsibility to suppress any of it that doesn't suit the gangsters in power. Have a look at this re-jig, and wonder why they don't want peace demonstrators to know that NYPD sharp-shooters had them in their sites: The Memory Hole - New York Times Deletes Mention of Police Snipers
And parallel nothing at all, if the American Right is so Christian in their caring about human rights, why is their #1 recepient of military aid the nation that is also #1 for the murder and disappearance of civil rights workers and labour activists? (Colombia, on both counts.) How is it that good people think they can profit or benefit from Enron logic?
BTW, one of my old pages is on psychopathy, those who are charming, and charismatic, and ambitious, and energetic, and goal-directed, and focused ... and entirely lacking conscience. One of the things I studied was how decent people came to be recruited into psychopath's programs ... turns out good and decent people are unlikely to judge something as being too good to be true, on one hand. On the other, good and decent people are unlikely to believe that people in power are capable of hugely monstrous lies. (Goebbles was on top of that one, too. His tactic was to rigidly avoid little lies, which people would detect, and then put one right over the top, knowing that good folk would be unwilling to credit his savage treachery. It worked, too. Like the snake in Eden, he knew his trade. And we've only gotten better at manipulating human appetites ... it's called marketing. Just think of the fabulous science that went into designing cigarettes and gambling machines!)
