"Just Ignore Inconvenient Facts"

“Liberals just ignore inconvenient facts.” That’s columnist Thomas Sowell, and he’s one of the lot I read as often as I can. He writes well, his research is impeccable, and he deals in facts. As far as they go. I also read Leonard Pitts religiously, same reasons. There are others – reasons for reading them the same. There’s just that one trouble with them all, and the “trouble” is the further fact that while truthful, the “facts” omit anything that doesn’t tend to support them.

Sowell, for instance, does not mention the thunderously obvious fact that “conservative” (I always use quotes with the word – check its dictionary definition) columnists and news media do exactly the same thing. On last night’s Hannity and Colmes segment, for instance, Hannity and Iran-Contra conspirator Oliver North conducted another of their patented propaganda campaigns for the Bush Administration concerning Iraq.

John Kerry, the dead horse Hannity and FoxNews somehow can’t stop beating, was again the target. Obviously – both from the fact of his political affiliation and the news from Iraq – the former presidential candidate had criticized “conduct” (just as obviously, and inasmuch as the prefix “con” means “together,” there ought to be a better choice of terms) of the war there.

Now, parenthetically, I don’t know if it’s still a “war” or not. One salient tactic of “disinformation” propaganda is euphemistic torture of terms. In a discussion where “precision munition” is a bomb that obliterates everything in a five hundred foot circle and destroys things out to two thousand yards, dozens, even hundreds, of human being are “collateral damage,” and all of it means the “target” has been “serviced,” just about anything is possible – and I mean literally.

Have the war in Iraq become a “conflict” yet?

Does the continual killing of persons in the Iraq “government” – there’s a government there? – constitute a rebellion, or is it still an “insurgency?” Or do I have to cite whose being attacked before you decide?

Has hundreds of Sunni Moslems being killed by Shiites, and vice versa, become a civil war yet?

This is being conducted?!

Oliver North (I can still see all those pictures of him in his Marine uniform, with all the ribbons, hand raised and solemnly swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and – well, you know) tells us for the how-manieth time that the troops morale is high as can be.

Well, now, you see, that’s the truth – as far as it goes. Morale is “as high as can be.” The morale of guys like my friend Richard, who has just been notified that he’s going back to Hell for the third time – that’s “redeployed,” you’ll note, and my choice of “back to Hell” is unpatriotic – IS “as high as can be.” It’s always been so that men and women raised and living in the arduous and trying conditions of a society like this one are ecstatic at the prospect of “deployment” to a paradise like Iraq. Being shot at and attacked by “improvised explosive devices” (need I point out that we are not talking about homemade fertilizer bombs?), and that by enemy and the people you’re “liberating” alike, is something they’ve always dreamed of enjoying.

Knowing that you are going back for “as long as it takes to accomplish the mission” – when the people saying that are as positive and definitive as they are – is a big morale booster. Kind of makes you wonder how many “redeployments” that translates to, doesn’t it? And doesn’t “stay the course” sound a hell of a lot like “keep going back until you’re killed?”

And then, there’s that “support our troops” thing. “Support” means sending them back again and again and again until they get dismembered or killed? Can we please stop discussing this in English? German, maybe? Spanish? Anything that won’t let you say things like “collateral damage.” Or “redeployment.”

Sean Hannity is a piece of work, isn’t he? It’s downright eerie to hear him immediately turn each mention of John Kerry to an excoriation of the latter for his revelations concerning atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. That’s as if it just didn’t happen. Last night, Oliver North - a Vietnam veteran, it must be mentioned - joined him in the surreal performance. Hannity and North, reminiscent of columnist Sowell’s “just ignore inconvenient facts, not only simply ignored the facts, but gave every indication that no such thing – not one instance – had ever occurred.

That despite the fact that atrocities by U.S. soldiers during the war in Vietnam have long since been admitted, compiled, and portrayed in movies like Winter Soldier, wherein more than a hundred soldiers testified incontrovertibly to having committed war crimes. Talk about an Irishman’s “Blarney!” The SOB looks you right in the eye, and tells you something like “you’re dead,” and expects – no demands – that you believe it. There were no U.S. atrocities in Vietnam?!

THE MORALE OF TROOPS IN IRAQ IS GOOD?! Well, hell, YES – everybody in the military is behind their fearless leader four-square. That’s why there are such long lines at all the recruiting stations.

Sorry, Mr. Sowell – torture or the truth isn’t limited to the liberal side of this looney-bin. Maybe in your next column you can tell me why it is that most of the people against this “conflict” (“Disagreement with weapons?” “Exchange of ‘target servicing’?”) – are veterans of actual combat, while all the guys beating the drums – heroes like Hannity and the rest of the right wing – are all in the “did not serve” column of my recent compilation having to do with such matters www.judoknighterrant.com/opinion

That should be a real morale booster, shouldn’t it?

Nope, liberals aren’t the only ones who ignore the inconvenient facts, and I’ve dedicated my website opinion page, ‘The Mongoose Trick,’ to the massive disinformation campaign being waged by the military industrial complex that rules here in the Nation of Laws, Land of the Free, against the public. That’s far too voluminous for this venue, but I’ve provided the URL where the reader can find the conclusive proof of what I say.

“All war is deception,” said Sun Tzu, and that’s what the “free press” is all about in an nation ruled by the agency also known as the House of Mirrors. It’s something any reasonable person might expect.
“Deception is a state of mind,” a director of counter-intelligence for the CIA once observed, “and deception is the mind of the state.”