Rewriting History

As I sit here in my small apartment in Santa Clara with internet access as my primary information source, I'm reading this story story and wondering who they are talking about. I haven't seen Fahrenheit 911 because I didn't need to see a hysterical documentary when like the rest of the world outside the US I had been watching the real thing as news.

Salon.com News & Politics | War Room: "But of course, members of the House and Senate weren't privy to all of the same intelligence the White House was. As Kevin Drum wrote the other day, it's true that lots of people thought before the war that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. 'The problem is . . . that there were also a fair number of people who had been skeptical about Iraqi WMD. INR, for example, thought the African uranium was bogus. DIA thought our prime witness for Iraqi-al-Qaida WMD collaboration was lying. The Air Force found the evidence on drones to be laughable. DOE didn't believe in the aluminum tubes. None of these dissents was acknowledged by the Bush administration.'

How would the prewar debate have gone if everyone knew what the administration knew before the war started: that stories from an al-Qaida member about an Iraq connection had been called into question; that warnings Colin Powell delivered about mobile weapons labs weren't based on solid evidence; that claims about an Iraq-Niger had been debunked within the CIA before Bush made them; that pronouncements Condoleezza Rice made about aluminum tubes had been discredited before she spoke?

We weren't able to have that kind of debate before the war began because the administration kept any questions, any uncertainties, any second-guessing entirely to itself. As John Kerry said this afternoon, the White House 'misled a nation into war by cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition.'"

On this point, though it pains me to admit it, I have to agree with the President. You swallowed it. Hook, line and sinker. Drank the koolaid. The little blue pill. Down the hatch. In this regard please do not try and yank my chain. I had access to none of the "intelligence" reports that Congress had available. I had access to nothing but the internet and the ability to read, assess and assimilate information. I didn't fall for it.Your excuse was you didn't have the cojones to speak the truth because you wanted to get elected. Well, we see how well that worked out. Our elected representatives and their embedded reporters didn't want to go against public opinion, didn't want to be marginalized, didn't want to do their jobs and stand up for the truth. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Congress passed quite a few bills based on manipulation and a desire for power over the average American and anyone else breathing on the planet.

I didn't start blogging until March but I have been politically vocal my whole life. I started paying attention Halloween night 1964 standing outside some house on Fairchild AFB, outside of Spokane, WA and I overheard two men heatedly discussing the difference between LBJ and Goldwater, something about a Catholic in the WH taking orders from the Pope and then some lady made them be quiet. I started reading the newspaper. I was eight.

We returned from Puerto Rico on my 12th birthday in 1968 to a different America than the one we had left three years before. Armed Forces Radio and Television only aired a few hours a day over there and deteriorating conditions in the US weren't included. I had to watch Batman in Spanish! They did have the Smothers Brothers though. Very odd. Pat Paulsen had great talking points. The only reason I looked at the papers was to find out about the space program. We arrived at Vandenberg AFB the night Robert Kennedy was shot. That summer was brutal. What a rude awakening. I wasn't a cute little brown girl with pigtails anymore, I was a black girl and relegated to a place I didn't like. Hello books! From the Bible to the biography of Babe Didrikson and every piece of scifi inbetween. I read all the news magazines since I found the news and politics on tv to be boring and newspapers used to be objective. I may not be a journalist but I always like to check when I hear something unusual. For five years I have watched and spoken forcefully about the dark path we were trodding. After 9/11 I cautioned people not to overreact until we had all the facts, but this nation went mad. People tried to call me unpatriotic and other things, but unlike a lot of people I remember my 12th grade American Government class and prefer to stand up for my rights while I still have them. Mom grew up under Hitler and she taught me that.

I tried reading the freeper sites but they scared me more than the liberal sites. Violence, incarceration and pretending that only one side is right is a recipe for disaster. There are a few conservative sites that I check in with, I just don't comment. Anymore. I tend to read some of the more entertaining and not so foaming at the mouth blogs along with the 10-12 news sites I read on a daily basis along with my RSS feeds and anything I might StumbleUpon.

This is our country and we need to take care of it just like we would take care of our home. It needs to be clean, well lit with fresh air with room for all and a community meeting place. People need to get to know their neighbors as individuals so we can respect each other's differences, encourage free discussion of ideas and prevent our ever being hoodwinked again.

In this age of modern technology there is no excuse to get your information from one biased source.