TV News LIES

Look what a few hundred demonstrators can do in a day: 1948 is on the agenda. The breach of the fence in the Golan Heights was enough to breach a far older and more complex fence, bringing 1948 to center stage in the political discussion.

We're still screwing things up and babbling ourselves to death about 1967 - will or won't Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utter the words "1967 borders," as if it makes a difference what he says. We're still babbling that the evil from the north, which may actually be good, is approaching, and the discussion has suddenly changed direction.

It is the human tendency to deny the reality of "conspiracy", even though all of human interaction is by definition a "conspiracy". Conspirators rely on this habit of denial, because it makes their conspiracies possible. As long as people are denying that conspiring is possible, then conspiring is guaranteed to be successful.

"Nobody would do that. Nobody would even think of doing that."

The credo of the most successful conspirators is this:  "Make what you do so far removed from normal thinking that normal thinkers would never even consider it possible."

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 — and I will not quibble. But the problem of the 21st century is the problem of culture, not just the infamous “culture of poverty” but what I would call the culture of smugness. The emblem of this culture is the term “American exceptionalism.”

It has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God. Maybe so, but on some days it’s hard to tell. The term “American exceptionalism” has been invoked by Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and, of course, Sarah Palin. I would throw in Michele Bachmann, since if she has not said it yet, she soon will because she says almost anything. She is no exception to the cult of American exceptionalism.

Most of the people in our society are sheep. We may be in the most violent times in history but, [in America,] violence is still remarkable rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin's egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without it's hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers and warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. For now, though, citizens still need warriors to protect them from predators.

He was our kind of guy until he wasn’t, an ally during the Cold War until he no longer served our purposes. The problem with Osama bin Laden was not that he was a fanatical holy warrior; we liked his kind just fine as long as the infidels he targeted were not us but Russians and the secular Afghans in power in Kabul whom the Soviets backed.

But when bin Laden turned against us, he morphed into a figure of evil incarnate, and now three decades after we first decided to use him and other imported Muslim zealots for our Cold War purposes, we feel cleansed by his death of any responsibility for his carnage. We may make mistakes but we are never in the wrong. USA! USA!

Among the most durable pieces of conventional wisdom circulating in Washington these days is that President Obama would never risk a confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (when he comes to town in May) out of fear of angering Israel's supporters in America a year before the U.S. presidential election.

The notion that domestic politics and the pro-Israel community hold the president's Middle East policy hostage seems to bind Washington like a hard-and-fast political law of gravity. The only problem is it's dead wrong and dangerous.