"Serious" people are the ones who raise the "serious" issues. What are the "serious" issues? Throughout centuries of dramaturgy, they have been birth, marriage, and death; love and war; and so on.

For the "serious" foreign policy expert, the only real topics therefore are:

---The Muslim birth rate

---War

(Gay marriage and free love being strictly domestic issues.)

So if you want to be "serious," raise the possibility of war at the water cooler or at parties:

"Hey, Bill, good to see you. You know, it's time we got serious about freedom. We should invade Greenland and liberate it from the Danes. Sure, people would die, and we'd regret their sacrifice, but isn't that the point? I mean, this is serious stuff here---people dying for freedom. It's not for pussies. Right, Bill?"

So, I guess by these standards, I must be a non-intellectual ideologue who was merely "lucky" in my guesses? What about the rest of you?

-- Karen M

Luck had not a damned thing to do with my "guesses". My first thought upon hearing about Iraq was...WTF?! It went downhill from there. So, as matter of necessity (in order to maintain my sanity, more or less) I read everything I could find that went beyond the MSM or the Bush Administration line. Or is that a redundancy?

One example that really stands out in my mind was when I watched Powell's presentation to the UN. I listened intently. Laughed out loud at some of the cartoon pictures he held up as "evidence" that Saddam Hussein had cute little wagons of bio weapon makers, and that he had caravans of trucks carting off WMD out of buildings...under our noses.

The MSM paraded and preened and ran for the hills in fear. I read a few key essays and rebuttals to Powell's presentation. Conclusion: "Bullshit. Powell is a fool and a liar."

Even though that huge dent in the credibility of the already extremely pounded to death credibility of the Bush Administration was just one of ever so many, I'd say it was the end game for me as far as putting any faith at all in what the administration was putting forth about Iraq's WMD and the whole sorry bit about 'going to war' and shock and awing a civilian population that just happened to be full of 'brown people'.

I suggest this piece by drational.

Karl Rove is Tricking You Again

by drational

Thu Aug 09, 2007 at 05:25:23 AM PDT

The FISA update was specifically pushed before the Congressional Summer Recess to generate exactly the reaction it has:

Remove Pressure from the Administration on purely domestic spying.

Fracture the Democratic Party, to create an issue of "more importance" to the progressives previously focusing their anger on the Administration.

If you have any doubts about why the Administration chose this time to ramrod FISA update through Congress, you should think hard and read below.

Furthermore, if you have bought into the current Democratic left-center schism, you are being manipulated by shrewd political players. You are a part of a media/issue framing exercise specifically designed to distract attention away from Administration illegality.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/9/63824/53794

Perhaps it's time for more people to start publically taking Gordon and his employer to task for this type of shoddy and partisan "journalism".

The address (above) is letters@nytimes.com.

I'm sure they'll appreciate the attention.

No, Jebbie, they won't. But you can at least get a guaranteed read for your letter at public@nytimes.com

On his way to another point WT said this:

Their lack of interest has been assiduously cultivated by the experts, and look where that has gotten us.

I'm personally proud of the amount of TV I avoid watching (pretty much all of it) but the fact remains that humans are programmable devices and a lot of thought and effort goes into shaping patterns of behavior that are most beneficial to franchise holders, chain stores and other advertisers. The fact that political discourse degenerates as a result is just a beneficial side effect.

Furthermore, if you have bought into the current Democratic left-center schism, you are being manipulated by shrewd political players. -- casual observer

1) The schism is real; it's existed for more than forty years. Even a Republican political genius could hardly miss it.

2) Tactics aren't a strategy, and while Republicans are busily hammering on their frames, things are coming through the window. Big, ugly things, like the casualty figures this month from Iraq.

3) If Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is ultimately proven to be smarter than the American people, I'll eat my hat. (The one that isn't my wife.)

Luck had not a damned thing to do with my "guesses". My first thought upon hearing about Iraq was...WTF?! It went downhill from there. So, as matter of necessity (in order to maintain my sanity, more or less) I read everything I could find that went beyond the MSM or the Bush Administration line. Or is that a redundancy?

One example that really stands out in my mind was when I watched Powell's presentation to the UN. I listened intently. Laughed out loud at some of the cartoon pictures he held up as "evidence" that Saddam Hussein had cute little wagons of bio weapon makers, and that he had caravans of trucks carting off WMD out of buildings...under our noses.

We know a number of people who are either in or were in the foreign policy establishment, most of them very bright people. Almost without exception, they all believed Powell's UN presentation to be "serious", with "solid and disturbing" evidence of Saddam's perfidy. When we said it sounded like bollocks to us -- and even cited some articles we had read via antiwar.com -- what we basically got was a metaphorical pat on the head for our unseriousness. One of these friends even went so far as to lecture me on my emotionally "unhealthy" anger at the Bush administration for what I perceived as their lying.

The kicker: these people are all Dems, none of them Hawks -- but all of them basically assume American hegemony and the rightness thereof.