An individual's self-identity is the base reference model for all social references and relations. Although our inclination is to use categories such as religion, politics and ethnicity to describe both individual and group identity traits, it is only our own ethnocentrism that makes them seem sufficient to the task.

If a person is taught to look outside themselves for their identity, they will find themselves forever subjected to the vagaries of the marketplace. They will live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. Today's "untermenschen" is tomorrow's "ubermenschen." "Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy." External identity is custom-made for hierarchy and control. It doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative. The result is the same. Today's revolutionary is tomorrow's counter-revolutionary.

If a person is taught to look to themselves for their identity, none of the categories of external identity will dominate. By definition they cannot. Internal identity tends to strip away everything until the only thing left is the unity of being, a philosophical term for empathy. That individual will not identity with a movement or group that is not inclusive and collaborative.

A good example of external versus internal identity reference, and one that is relevant to this discussion, are the growing calls by the Right for genocide against our enemies in the Mideast and calls for protection (or accelerated genocide in the case of Ann Coulter) of the innocents against whom our enemies are committing genocide in Africa. This US and THEM, continually foregrounded in the MSM, is very much intended to pit Christianity against Islam, to portray our involvement in the Mideast as a war of cultures, a battle for the preservation of democracy. The only reason this propaganda has succeeded to the extent that it has is because in the US, religion is publicly identified through the MSM with a specific form of a specific religion, fundamentalist Christianity. Although Christianity constitutes one-third of the world's population (approximately 2.1 billion) and is the religious preference of approximately 85% of the US population, fundamentalist Christianity only represents 25% of the US population. That Christianity is so easily placed in the service of US geo-politics says less about Christianity than it does about the failure of US society to see and decry the machinations of those people who use external identity references to religion, politics and capitalism as a collective, ersatz definition of "freedom."

It should come as no surprise that the increasing cognitive dissonance is overwhelming the abilities of many people on the Right to cope. And it should not be a surprise to anyone that the THEM in the Right's worldview has grown to include almost everyone in the world as a result. When you are in a spot like that, genocide begins to make more and more sense. Nuclear war makes more and more sense. And totalitarian control of your own country by a single person (if that person is on your side) makes the most sense of all.

As important as it is to determine the facts behind the firings of the U.S. attorneys, that is only step one.

Given the apparently rampant politicisation of the DoJ, step one is not enough. Step two should be the determination of the facts behind the hires who replaced the fired attorneys combined with a close look at those senior attorneys who were not fired.

I know that it is important to support one's arguments with logic and verifiable references. And I know that simple generalizations are almost never sufficient to describe the complexity of any social process.

I also know that it is equally important to be succinct when possible.

That being said:

MSM news is a joke!

And the MSM journalists and reporters who report the MSM news are a joke! They're a joke! A joke!

They're such a joke they make me want to cry.

And as for the reasons the MSM and its journalists are such a joke:

"they're too well known to repeat."

If I ever get a tattoo, that's what it will say, "MSM news is a joke!"

Well, Glenn.

You may have found your calling. In the left corner we have Glenn Greenwald weighing in at (I have no idea). In the right corner we have a half-dozen multi-national corporate conglomerates weighing in at a significant fraction of the global economy.

You're rapidly moving into Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk territory.

Good luck. They'll soon each be cranking up their own little research departments to analyze your every jot and tittle.

In the article you state that, "Skepticism increased in 1972 after Joyce Carol Oates, in a letter to the New York Times, expressed bewilderment that a reviewer had accepted Castaneda's books as nonfiction."

I would suggest that Castaneda did not deny that he had created don Juan as a literary fiction. In a recent entry on the blog "You Bet Your Life", Harvey Bialy references a Letter to the Editor that he wrote to the Boston Phoenix in which he asks Mr. Castaneda, "Who Are You?"

"Mr. Castaneda's circumspect non-denial (Phoenix, April 19) of his correspondence with Mr. Bialy (Phoenix, April 12), brings to mind the funnel vision of poetic fiction, the prisms of fiction stretched outward to accommodate an expanding field of truths."

http://barnesworld.blogs.com/barnes_world/2007/04/harvey_bialy_th.html