by Anthony Gucciardi

On any given day you can find a news story that focuses on the conflict between democrats and republicans, or Group A and Group B. These groups could be anything, but as long as they are toted as being the opposite of each other, they will clash. When one party supports a bill, the other tends to oppose it. This holds true for both sides, creating a never-ceasing battle over political parties, as opposed to policy.

The change in each party’s fundamental policies has been warped into an infinitesimally minute amount of distinction from one another. When one does not agree with the “Republican” stance, they generally lean towards a “Democratic” stance. The guise of the two parties creates a false sense of freedom and liberation from a structured ideal.

The Soviet Union’s single party system was a failure due to it’s inability to withstand a dissident attack. The United States two-party system is simply the post-beta form of the Soviet-style political spectrum, with the guise of liberty upon it’s aging fangs.

Holding Hands

The word paradigm (paradigma), compounded from it’s Greek root word ???????? “to show”, accurately describes the dimension between the left and right party. This paradigm requires a vice grip of social ideology held together for stability. A single party’s influence can break, without a backboard to cater towards any dissidence.

Two parties can stand up against one another to create both geometrically and intellectually a more powerful structure that can withstand intense dissidence from each party for one reason: the rebellion of the first party’s ideals are reciprocated by the second.

Real Issues

The war between left and right diminishes the focus on real issues. A frighteningly large number of people will make all their decisions based upon their party leaders. The debate turns into left verses right, instead of what is best for the country. The mainstream media loves to turn everything into a matter of “party wars”, instead of discussing the actual issue at it’s core.

Instead of thinking “left” or “right”, think about it from a human perspective. What will this do to our country? How will it affect me? How will it affect my neighbors?

Thinking for yourself

Imagine for a moment that your car has broken down. You go to a used car dealership and search around for a nice car. There are no price tags on the cars, but the place seems rather professional. You find a car you like, and it looks like it’s in pretty decent condition. You ask about the price, and the salesman says it will cost you $95,000.

In this case, most people would first investigate the true value of the car before purchasing it. While it seems completely logical to find the true value of the car, many do not take this metaphorical step when it comes down to left verses right. Placing blind trust in the leaders of a political party is just like trusting the used car salesman to give you the best price. Find out the truth for yourself, as it’s the only way to truly find out what’s going on.

Media Spins

The mainstream media loves to take legitimate topics and turn them into a battle between political parties. A perfect example is the Healthcare bill. Even though it has ridiculous policy changes, and a eugenics-based provision system, it is still turned into a left verses right issue by the media. Luckily people have begun to see through this false two party system, and are beginning to realize they are being played.

The mainstream media’s deception is wearing off quite rapidly, as the public begins to realize that they are being duped. The public is realizing that regardless of which party the current political figurehead (puppet) is affiliating himself with, he is still the same as the previous leader. It is a vicious cycle that continues to this day. The difference is that now the people are waking up to this cycle, and opposing it.

Ally yourself with humanity, not parties

You do not have time to waste on petty arguments that center around the false “party wars”. Use your time to get real information out, like the implications of the Healthcare bill, or theshocking dangers of vaccinations. True patriotism is to have thoughts that do not derive from the structured and targeting news media, or the most famous political puppet in your region.

by Gene Lyons

Aug. 27, 2009 | So yet another Bush administration Cabinet-level official has petitioned to get his conscience and reputation back. This time, it’s Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security. The one-time Pennsylvania governor admits in a new book that he felt political pressure from the White House to issue bogus terror alerts before the 2004 presidential election.

Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn’t grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration’s basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the “Texas cowboy” who’s never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who’s doing all that brush-cutting?

Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that’s broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.

People who smelled a rat, see, “based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence.” Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration’s good intentions.

Confronted with ample contemporaneous evidence of Bush administration flimflams by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and the scholarly Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake.com, Ambinder apologized for the “gut hatred” part. But he alibied: “Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.”

Yeah, sure. Purely with regard to terrorism and national security, by 2004, Bush/Cheney had already gotten caught deceiving the public about having “no warning” before the 9/11 attacks, not to mention about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. If skepticism was still inappropriate, would it ever be warranted?

Yet people who found the timing of terror alerts suspect, such as then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were dismissed as crackpots.

It was much the same after former Secretary of State Colin Powell confessed misgivings about his 2003 U.N. speech that stampeded the United States into an ill-advised war in Iraq. How could any serious American journalist possibly have seen that coming? Or, as your humble, obedient servant here wrote at the time, “War fever, catch it.”

This column summarized “mainstream” opinion on Feb. 12, 2003: “The allegedly ‘liberal’ Washington Post responded editorially with a one-word headline, ‘Irrefutable.’ Columnist Mary McGrory announced that despite being almost a pacifist … ‘I’m Persuaded,’ mostly by what she described as Powell’s unimpeachable integrity. Joining the stampede was New York Times columnist Bill Keller, who noted that ‘The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club includes op-ed regulars at this newspaper and the Washington Post, the editors of the New Yorker, the New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek.”

And yet it was all rubbish, exactly as some of us raised on intelligence hoaxes suspected. Evidence of what I called “chicanery and fraud” in the U.S. case against Iraq was obvious to anybody unafraid to see it.

But here’s the big thing about “mainstream” journalism and what Ambinder calls “information asymmetry.” Upton Sinclair said it best: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Furthermore, the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn’t it happen to them? (The job I got fired from that month wasn’t paying my bills.) The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington.

What did it matter if we killed the wrong Arabs, so long as Arabs were being killed? In Thomas Friedman’s immortal words, “We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.”

Under oath to a Senate committee, Condi Rice told a barefaced whopper about the Aug. 6, 2001, CIA terrorism briefing that Bush blew off. Media insiders pretended not to notice. Bush made a slapstick skit of searching under his Oval Office desk for Iraqi WMDs. The press laughed on cue. He claimed that Saddam Hussein forced him to invade Iraq by expelling U.N. arms inspectors. (In reality, Bush made them leave.) Pundits praised his charm.

Long under siege for “liberal bias,” media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. True, fearless scrappers like my friend Joe Conason have always been around, and somebody like Paul Krugman — a world-class economist who doesn’t care what, say, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews thinks of him — can be very annoying.

But what’s really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association

by Paul J. Balles

Paul J. Balles shows how the US media’s application of Joseph Goebbels’s dictum – that a lie, if audacious enough and repeated enough times, will be believed by the masses – has produced a plethora of anti-Arab bigots, from the likes of Steve Emerson, Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick and Ruth Conniff to the racist ranting of brainless lumpen on the internet.

More insidious than the wars with tanks and guns, aircraft and bombs, missiles and guidance systems, shock and awe campaigns. The wickedest wars are the wars for people’s minds – the propaganda campaigns that exercise thought control.

“Get control over radio, press, cinema and theatre,” said Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister. He perfected an understanding of the “Big Lie” technique of propaganda based on the principle that a lie, if audacious enough and repeated enough times, will be believed by the masses.

Western brainwashing comes from the media. Readers, listeners and viewers need to be aware of these propaganda sources. About the media in general, Steven Salaita correctly observed:

The flippancy with which US media apply the word “terrorism” to Arab populations reinforces the notion that violence in the Arab world is ahistorical and therefore senseless. Arabs in turn become a people without narratives who belong to a culture incapable of rationality.

Steve Emerson has a website and blog with as much anti-Arab ranting on it as any bigot might produce. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has implied that all Arabs are potential terrorists and therefore worthy of slaughter. American Israeli Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Post, writes two weekly syndicated columns preaching hard-line Israeli propaganda.

In The Progressive, Ruth Conniff validated the false but widespread notion that while violence exists among both Arabs and Israelis, terrorism is exclusive to the Arabs. When Arabs fight against Israelis, the Arabs are guilty of “terrorist violence” but the Israelis are engaging in “military reprisals”.

On anti-Arab radio you hear things like “Arabs love dictators” and “Obama is an Arab,” as if being an Arab disqualifies one from humanity. If they aren’t referring to Arabs as “camel jockeys” or “rag heads”, they’re calling them as Islamo-fascists. Along with O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck give Fox news stable of anti-Arab propagandists.

Hollywood films have been vilifying Arabs for decades. Jack Shaheen revealed, in The TV Arab, how television stereotypes Arabs as “billionaires, bombers and belly dancers”.

Even as a youngster, Shaheen was disturbed by the Arab stereotypes in children’s cartoon characters.

In Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs, a long line of degrading images – from Bedouin bandits and submissive maidens to sinister sheikhs and gun-wielding “terrorists” – have vilified Arabs since the days of silent films.

In his research, Shaheen identified more than 1150 films that defile Arabs. His newest book, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11, reveals how the film industry continues to shape American understanding of Arabs and Arab culture.

Muslim scholar Ziauddin Sardar made it clear that anti-Islamic brainwashing is not new: “From the days of Voltaire right up to 1980, thanks largely to the efforts of Enlightenment scholars, it was a general Western axiom that Islam had produced nothing of worth in philosophy, science and learning.”

That the propaganda has reached the masses should be clear from some of the slurs on the internet, examples of which are displayed here:

F**K ALL YOU SAND NIGGERS! I HOPE WE BLOW YOU ALL UP AND TAKE THE ONLY THING YOU ARE GOOD FOR OIL!

It wasn’t enough to curse Arabs. He had to shout it, writing his message in uppercase letters, revealing how effective anti-Arab propaganda has been in America.

Those who control the media control the mental attitudes of the population; Americans have been programmed to hate Arabs and Muslims and to love Israelis. How could compassionate Americans be nonchalant about their slaughter of a million Arabs in Iraq, even though they know that it was all based on lies? Decades of propaganda and brainwashing.