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By James Howard Kunstler
on May 2, 2011 8:42 AM
Mark these words: within about three hours, the “Birther” faction around America will be asking for Osama Bin Laden’s driver’s license. What I’d like to know is how come he was “buried at sea,” when the operation took place at least a thousand miles from the sea. Did the US Navy Seals transfer his remains from a helicopter to a boat? Or to an airplane? And did they just drop him over the night-darkened Indian Ocean like a sack of lentils? By the time you read this, the whole world will be clamoring for photos of the deceased. Maybe our guys will produce some. Quien Sabe?
I didn’t intend to write about Bin Laden this morning, but rather the nutrient medium of untruth that has come to surround all the tissue of everyday life in the USA. Until the Bin Laden operation went down Sunday, the big news of the week was the release of President Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate. A substantial number of Republicans still claim to believe that Obama is not a real American citizen. You may be sure they will persist, no matter what. Goebbels, too, knew the power of sheer repetition. One of the Birther leaders, Orly Taitz, immediately made the claim that the term “African” describing Obama’s father’s nationality on the document must be a latter-day PC dodge because back then the term-du-jour was “Negro.”
When historians gather around their campfires a half century from now, they will marvel at our idiocy. Among the vital matters we failed to reckon was the diminishing returns of technology as applied to news and information. The slicker our electronic media got, the less sense the public could make of the information stream that they drowned in. How many iPhones and Blackberries are jangling this morning, I wonder, with “news” that Bin Laden was buried at sea because he is Obama’s real father? To the Birthers, I’m sure Bin Laden qualified as some sort of “Negro.” The story will be on Fox News by suppertime in Atlanta, just watch.
You had to love the way Donald Trump pretended to be the hero of the Obama birth certificate story. Has anyone asked for a birth certificate for the creature that is living on Donald Trump’s head. I suspect it is a wolverine. Did it come from Michigan or Wisconsin, or possibly Canada? Is it a protected or endangered species? And was it obtained by legal means? (Perhaps he found it in a taxidermy shop.) Is there some way the Navy Seals can drop Donald Trump over the Bermuda Triangle. It would make me proud to be American again.
Against the background of what comes to look like a thirty-three ring circus in America’s affairs is the remarkable stream of lying that emanates even from places previously thought to be mentally normal. I listen to the radio when I linger around the kitchen at suppertime and on Friday evening a NASA official came over the airwaves extolling all the future space exploits of the agency. Mining asteroids for high grade metals! Journeys to Mars and beyond! I thought: is this jaboney out of his skull? We’ll be lucky if anyone can drive a powered vehicle from Hackensack to Paramus in ten years. An aerospace scientist ought to know that. If these guys are clueless about the future of travel, imagine how deranged a Tea Party official from Chugwater, Wyoming, must be.
NPR’s Market Place show, about economic and financial matters, is every bit as dishonest as CNBC or Fox. Every night, Market Place issues cheers for a stock market that is rising strictly on the basis of a concerted, wide-open stock pumping scheme operated by the Federal Reserve in partnership with five Wall Street banks and the US Treasury Department. (Why? To maintain an illusion that the economy is in wonderful condition.) As far as I know, not a single on-air economics reporter understands that we are in a contraction phase of history, not a growth phase. Nor that “growth,” as commonly defined, is impossible given the primary energy resource constrictions now underway. Something has gone terribly wrong in an education system that produces journalists this badly-informed.
full article at source: http://www.theburningplatform.com/?paged=2
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- Navy SEALS Asked Bin Laden To Surrender; When He Resisted, He Was Shot In Head (benzinga.com)
- Osama Bin Laden Dead: Fact or Fiction? (dabxblogger.com)
