TV News LIES

In his address to Congress, the prime minister noted that "the vast majority of the 650,000 Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines reside in neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and Greater Tel Aviv."

He declared that "under any realistic peace agreement, these areas, as well as other places of critical strategic and national importance, will be incorporated into the final borders of Israel." "Strategic and national importance" is the giveaway phrase. It shows how Netanyahu smuggles moral claims into his security arguments.

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.

A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants.

There has never been a person who has been successfully brainwashed who believed he was brainwashed. It lies within the definition of the word itself. This is the crux of the problem that the crux of the matter reveals. The majority of the people are automatons responding to media and social cues and have no control over their destiny.

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.