Imus, Mangum, Illegal Aliens, Mr. Cheney's Threat - What Does It All Tell Us?

A few days ago, someone sent me a video of a song. “If I Should Die Before You Wake” is powerful. Very. It includes pictures like one of a U.S. Soldier “offering five” to a little Iraqi boy. Like one I posted on my website some time ago, that of a soldier holding a sleeping little Iraqi girl who without him was otherwise traumatized by fear and disconsolate, it’s powerfully emotive stuff.

Yes, I told the missive’s sender, it put a lump in my throat, too. But, I added, perhaps not for the same reasons.

You see, I said, I've fought for this country, too. I've killed for it, and I've felt bullets and shrapnel pass through my flesh. Some of the latter worked its way out of me just the other day, matter of fact; and a couple of years ago, I recovered some of the hearing in an ear after digging out of the ear canal a piece of shrapnel that must have been in my head (yeah, that might explain some things, too) for years.

I've been there. I've also been the mouse in the corner where the planning for things like Iraq was and is concerned.

I’ve been there, but don't LIKE to destroy anyone's illusions, especially about a thing like this, and I certainly don't like to offend anyone, either. But I was raised to be a man of honor by a man I might otherwise consider a saint, and I can do no other than point out that to say our soldiers, these supremely brave and decent young men and women, are NOT fighting for our freedom.

And that they think they are fighting for their country and its freedom makes only the difference that they are fighting for what they believe. They, like most who hear this song, are simply deceived. They are the victims of the most modern and most powerful propaganda ever devised (of course – why would a nation as advanced in science, medicine, technology and all the rest be otherwise?)

In fact, a federal (CIA) program costing the parents and grandparents of these soldiers millions and intended to do just that has deceived them and us. That program, the predecessor for others more technical and state-of-the-art, was Operation Mockingbird (you can google it, or go to my website www.judoknighterrant.com).

I assure everyone who reads this that no one agonizes over this war more than I. It is the only reason I endure the maddeningly commercial-mutilated scheduling and programming or watch the execrably bad entertainment and political punditry of today’s television. More, I search the internet newspapers daily in my effort to stay current – somebody should show that much interest, goddammit – on casualties and events in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frustration and fury of having to watch the networks juxtaposition blazoned, yet inconsequential nonsense like the recent Imus Affair, with a flow strip across the bottom announcing irregularly and rarely the deaths of our soldiers in a war beggars description.

It probably tells anyone elsewhere in the world who sees it everything he needs to know about us, too. In the nation who professes to the world its respect for the individual and his rights, this is what we actually do.

The totality of my frustration includes the obvious fact that the nation is so decadent, so stupidly stultified and political ideological, that it permits the government to spend the lives of their neighbors' children on what amounts to little more than satisfying the ambitions of the military industrial complex corporations and their scion, George W. Bush.

There are so many examples of the Operation Mockingbird propaganda lying being leveled against us all that it would be impossible to pick one representative of the rest. FoxNews expert Col. David Hunt came pretty close this morning. He said that inasmuch as there were more people being killed in Iraq (more attacks being made, is the way he actually put it), the "surge" in the number of troops being committed must be "working."

If you have to read that again, by all means do it. More killing by our enemy means we're doing better. If there remain any people who don’t recognize that as Orwell’s Newspeak, I’d like to know what they do see.

You do remember “Newspeak,” don’t you? Newspeak was designed to remove all connotation and shade of meaning from language, to leave remaining only simple antonyms or dichotomies – happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain, good thoughts and bad thoughts (i.e., “thought crimes”). Rendered simple-minded in effect by Newspeak, the public could do nothing but submit to the total dominance of the State. You don’t recognize that today? Really? Operation Mockingbird has been even more effective than even I realized.

Folks, get it through you heads that you were lied to, that you're being lied to, and that this war is deliberately being drawn out to the greatest length and extent possible. The reasons and motives are obvious, demonstrated relentlessly every day by the same television being used to addle your brains. More, take any other offense from stealing cookies to murder, and show me a prosecutor who couldn't win a conviction against a defendant who put forward as a defense the same arguments being made by the military industrial complex, their media, and their president.

This is ridiculous and it is criminal - and no amount of beautiful lyrics and melody, in a parody of a child's night time prayers, can change that. We, the people of the United States are responsible.

We have the duty and responsibility to either commit everything we have to "victory" (and, as I've already written elsewhere on my page here, that means killing - killing everyone who stands or might stand against us), or leave. Everything else is immoral, and immoral in the highest possible degree. History, including that the memories of all the families whose sons and daughters we are spending, won't forget.

Neither will affiliation with a political party expiate individual responsibility and guilt for what is going on. It won’t do to simply say, I’m a Democrat, or I’m a Republican in answer to being questioned about one’s support for or tolerance of this war.

It won’t do, either, to say “It’s my country.” That was the “Good German Excuse” that permitted madmen to murder millions of people a few decades ago. I concluded my answer to the lady who sent me the song by saying that I was sorry, truly sorry, to gainsay the lyrics of a song as beautiful as this; but, I said, honor demands it. This is wrong!

Meanwhile, the monumental success of federal government programs like Mockingbird goes on being demonstrated by things like the incredible Don Imus Affair. Already, the government co-opted media has moved into the “erase by media silence” phase of its damage control operation concerning the Duke University Lacrosse Team. There will, of course, be a blizzard of lawsuits – most, if not all, against the several television networks who pilloried the players from the beginning of the matter, and you can bet that as I write this the master propagandists and “spin-doctors” of the media are lucubrating night after night.

Damage control will have begun long before news of rape charges having been dropped, matter of fact.

One might – obviously, I should think - expect that the several patriarchal corporations owning the several television networks involved not only drew all the same conclusions rational people did once having learned of the total absence of evidence in the matter, it is also certain that the corporations choice to permit pillorying of the young men by such feminist hatemongers as Nancy Grace and Wendy Murphy was based on the now infamous Ford Pinto Rule. Defense of the lawsuits, that is, would cost far less than profits to be realized by the media assault on the lives of three young men.

Hate sells, after all, and hate like that of the sexist feminist or racist Afro-American sells in proportions irresistible to an “American” capitalist.

Even people the caliber of Grace and Murphy, were their minds not riddled by the dementia of feminist sexism, would have known from the outset that prosecution was impossible. Not even our legal and courtroom procedure having to do with rape, gutted as it is by feminist sexism, is that bad. The conclusion for the candid observer from outside the affair is obvious; and I, for one, said so from the very first.

That conclusion is also instructive where other matters are concerned.

Take the matter being used to provide a smoke screen for the Duke case, the Imus Affair. Consider what any rational individual, unaffected by decades of federal Operation Mockingbird propaganda would think of the assertion that college-age women, women already awash in the language of our black and “Hip-Hop” culture, wept over what Imus said. That’s almost the definition of absurd, certainly a metaphorical paraphrase thereof.

But, there it is. A direct, mirror-image parallel of the way Cuban expatriates in the U.S. have twisted political arms to keep the nation in its equally absurd posture toward Fidel Castro, the ability of black U.S. citizens to do the same kind of arm-twisting in regard this latest example of self-defeating bigotry is most revealing and indicative of things like our national foreign policy and matters far more important. I return momentarily to that flow strip I mentioned at the outset here.

Among the matters it sheds great light upon is the safety of the individual in a nation whose people and government have that kind of priorities. A few days ago, for instance, the Vice-President made the threat that if we pull out of Iraq, “terrorism” – his word – would be brought home to the United States. To those who will immediately bridle at that, I point out that in the light of the now thunderously obvious foot-dragging by the Bush Administration where the flood of illegal aliens from Mexico is concerned, to say nothing of literally dozens of additionally examples of federal disdain for the safety of our citizenry, there is only one way to take what Cheney said.

We all remember, moreover, the government watchdog that didn’t bark prior to 9-11.

If the borders are to remain open and unguarded, for government to say that it has knowledge that terrorists will follow us home – to say nothing of the world-wide announcement – is a threat, not a warning.

But I digress somewhat. The question before the individual U.S. citizen today is this: what do you think our government, indeed, your fellow citizen, would or will do when you are in any kind of real danger, distress, or pain? What will government and your fellow “American” do, if we - you - are attacked by a foreign enemy, by terrorists?

Well, what would you do? Won’t your fellow “Americans” do just what you’re doing about the maiming and killing of their neighbors’ fathers, sons, and daughters? Pedophiles, kidnappers, rapists, and murderers from Mexico are doing that now. What's happening there? Just what you’re doing about a president who has made a mockery of our Constitution? Just what you’re doing about a U.S. Congress cynically dithering over matter after matter critical to our safety?

Here it comes again. Another “Good German Excuse.” “What can I do?” What can you do? About fifty things, but one that comes to mind today, the day before the citizen will be dragged in for his annual shearing and humiliation, is this: imagine what would happen were every taxpayer to file for an extension of the time in which to pay his income taxes. Imagine what kind message would result were ninety million or so of us to file for an extension. You can begin writing a letter daily to your congressman, senators, and the White House. Every day. You can do the same where all the television networks are concerned. You can ask all your friends to do the same, networking the action to as near a nuclear chain reaction is possible.

As I write this, the radio announces that the Air Force (!) has begun training it airmen and airwomen for ground combat.

When will enough be enough? Your neighbors’ fathers, sons, and daughters are being maimed and killed, goddammit. You are sleep-walking, hypnotized by a government media owned by the military industrial complex corporations. Wake the hell up!

Like weapons, medicine, electronics, technology of all kinds, and many more, the people of the United States of America didn’t invent hypocrisy. But, just as they have become scientifically sophisticated, they have raised hypocrisy to a level history could never before have imagined. More, my recent book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” is subtitled, “’America’ and Its Freedom Myths.” I’ve never, in other words, had any doubt about my country’s proclivity for self-serving and self-deceiving dissimulation.

But the most recent example is absolutely stultifying. More, nothing could have more thunderously and clearly made apparent the chaotic effect of our national hypocrisy on our nation and its absolutely necessary ability to do justice than the juxtaposition of the Don Imus Affair and that of a “Nation of Laws” and “Land of the Free” having finally acquitted of rape the Duke University Lacrosse Team players.

A supposedly sexist and racist “slur” equated with perjuring accusation of rape.

Originally, I wrote here that we would stop to think about what that means. Don’t bother: a nation and people as deliberately – whether passively or actively doesn’t matter here – mindless in the fragmented state it is found aren’t capable any more of useful thought.

Oh, there will be some, and it is for them, and for history, that I bother with what follows. Somebody now living may benefit, and some historian of the future may come across these message-in-a-bottle lines.

Don Imus uttered three words that could not possibly do any real harm to anyone normally rational and emotionally healthy; by that, I mean one whose mind has not been twisted, folded, torn, stained, or mutilated by the devastating traffic of sexism and racism that has run over and through it. I’ve announced my topic for today, so I’ll point out that the same people who are raging at Don Imus are the ones whose sexism and racism made his supposed victims so vulnerable.

In twenty minutes, find or dream up for me a more archetypical example of hypocrisy.

“Nappy-headed ho.” I have, since my last writing here, discovered one thousand, one hundred and thirteen repetitions of that term in normal Black American art, music, and discourse. It is everywhere that Black Americans frequent - literally everywhere - from the halls of the highest public offices, to the street corners. It is all but impossible to imagine a conversation having to do with the distaff side of that culture and between black males that doesn’t produce it at least once.

And, we are told by the tabloid scum-sucking, hatemongering media, that young women on the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball team wept on account of a white man having said it. One needs only to try to imagine a black woman weeping because a black man called her a “ho” – I still can’t find out what “nappy-headed” means; no one seems to know (?????) – and you’ve made my point.

Next we consider Crystal Gail Mangum. Let’s get a couple of things out of the way – all of it far more familiar to the general public in the United States than the word “ho” is to Black Americans. Crystal Gail Mangum should not elude prosecution for her lies because she is a woman, because she is poor, because she is black, or because she is a whoring stripper.

I’d say the same thing if she were filthy rich, powerful, and male. If that reminds anyone of a certain All-Pro football player who murdered his wife, tough. It’s even fair to mention that the football player was a Black American. Crystal Gail Mangum, like the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Lauren Lake, Anthony D. Bradley, and all the scum who carried banners demanding castration for the three falsely accused players, and drove by means of their political clout a scheming demagogue politician to avail himself of perjury, don’t deserve to kiss the feet of all the decent people of their race or otherwise.

As difficult as life as been made for them – especially now that government chooses to inflict illegal immigration from Mexico on the youth among them seeking employment - all of these people have somehow managed to live without making any self-serving attempt like this to destroy and defile the lives of others.

I’ve written here repeatedly to deplore the use being made of hate by the U.S. Government and its propagandist media. More, this is about hypocrisy, and I don’t want to make of myself a hypocrite, so I will point out that I don’t hate hatred, not entirely. In fact, I once demanded it of my sons. True, I demanded that they love the liar, but I also demanded that they hate the lie. I hate the prostitution of hate, the sale of it to a public as eager for it as that same public is for drugs, for pornography, and for the food with which they stuff their gluttonous bellies and walrus-like forms.

But I don’t hate Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Crystal Gail Mangum. I don’t even hate the ravening morons who clamored for the blood – castration means blood, you know – of three young guys who went to watch a woman disrobe (still another thing done since antiquity, but now somehow become a crime against all things female). Stupidity falls at some point off the target of hate. Even a mean dog is hard to hate.

Far from hating, I stand in stupefied astonishment at the shear single-mindedness and minimalist vapidity of militant feminist sexists like Nancy Grace, Wendy Murphy, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Georgia Goslee, and those who used a host of internet websites and other forms of communication including television to spew – and flaunt with meretricious arrogance for all to see - their legally suicidal and rabidly ferocious hatred of anything male. To confess, I spent more time laughing at the bizarre spectacle of otherwise well-educated people engaged in such ridiculously self-demeaning spiritual burlesque dancing and posturing pantyhose-pontificating.

Where Black females joining in the witches’ witch hunt for warlocks were concerned, they were like their counterparts on the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team – the only emotions possible being sympathy or “what-the-hell-is-this?” mirth. Motor-mouthed Lauren Lake, for instance, is comical more than anything else, and the black feminist website I cited yesterday will give the reader all he needs to make the point (besides, this is comical stuff, worth reading if only in that regard).

http://blackfeminism.org/index.php/2006/03/28/duke-u-lacrosse-team-rape-case/

But I digress. Which would you rather have: someone call you the most vile name imaginable, or have him so empowered and free to send you to prison by simply pointing a finger and yelling “rape!”? The synergistic coupling of fervid minimalist feminism with the hatemongering of federal government has reached critical mass, a fact thundering despite themselves like an atomic explosion through the Operation Mockingbird-controlled media.

Nothing - not even the fact of hundreds of men imprisoned for the crime of rape they didn’t commit - could represent in such Brobdingnagian fashion the evil result of affairs like the Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Case. We are in a death struggle now, one wherein we eradicate the virus raging through our societal veins, or we die as a nation.

When we are no longer capable of simple justice, in other words, where our lives or freedom may be forfeit to sexist or racist ideology and the mania attendant them, we are no longer the United States of America. When the uncorroborated testimony of single witness, in violation of one of the oldest tenets of jurisprudence known to man, can deprive any one of us of his freedom, we cease to be a nation of laws. No hypocritical demagoguery, no sanctimonious societal sophistry, and no individually self-righteous and self-aggrandizing argument can change that.

Already, examples like FoxNews’ Megyn Kelly last night and others during the early hours of the Imus and Duke news scum-suck frenzy, the arrogantly assured voices of minimalist feminism are being heard. What, Kelly wondered, would the states capitulation in the Duke case mean for future “victims of rape.” Would the women be loathe to “come forward? “

Not, Megyn, if she has evidence other than her word to support her effort to send a man to jail for forty or so years.

Already, even before the echoes of the first shouts have died, the mindless urges of feminist minimalist begin to demand that a practice almost as odious as the unus testis nullus testis conviction of innocent men continue. Of course, I speak of the immunity from consequences for the woman who has used perjury to deprive an innocent man of his freedom – and, for some reason, to ignore the danger to life and limb inherent in being arrested for such a crime. Anticipating, perhaps, trouble with keeping liar Crystal Gail Mangum free of responsibility for her outrage of justice, female “analysts” have already made the suggestion that she has psychological “issues.”

Until the dawn of militantly mindless feminism, perjured report leading to false arrest was a serious matter. I’d do that, too, were I they. I find it, however, demeaning to the women I love that penis envy should have been raised to the level of the justification for criminal conduct once reserved to temporary insanity. If the female would have equality under the law, then she must accept equality under the law.

“No” meaning “maybe” or “yes” may be a female prerogative everywhere else, but it cannot be in the law.

Once, moreover, burden of proof at civil and common law rested upon the shoulders of the individual or individuals claiming injury. While certain actions were held to be injurious per se, none other might be claimed. Jurisprudence obviated entirely the very real possibility otherwise of each citizen or group thereof making law applicable only to him or themselves. No more: today, the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team might claim that being called The Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team did them injury and made them cry.

Not long ago, apologist for black racism like Lauren Lake were able to somehow convince themselves and their racial fellows that paying one of their number a compliment offended the rest. Black racism, it seemed, had learned at great deal from militant feminism, and the affair ought to have served warning for what was to come, the Imus case, but it didn’t.

The hideous parallels and corollaries are everywhere. No nation, “conceived and dedicated” as this one once was, can go on with a great segment of its public existing in the mental and emotional state of seven or eight year olds. We cannot hold up the airliner of government and national affairs every time the child among us has a temper tantrum. If it is necessary to formally legalize certain supposed hate words, we must do just that.

If supposed hate can be made illegal, the law may certainly decide that certain words are not hateful or against the law. Just as it is where "unus testis, nullus testis" is concerned, it's time.

"Over the past six months, 60 Minutes has examined nearly the entire case file, more than 2,000 documents, including police reports, witness statements and medical records. The evidence 60 Minutes has seen reveals disturbing facts about the conduct of the police and the district attorney, and raises serious concerns about whether or not a rape even occurred."
Ed Bradley, 60 Minutes: The Duke Rape Case CBS

I’d like to point out that Ed Bradley, who died a while back of leukemia, was black, an Afro-American. So are people like the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton. This little essay has a great deal to do with the galaxial gulfs between the latter two and the former. Bradley was a stud, the kind made by integrity. That others are just stuff – here, while the ecosystem and political system sustains them.

Of course, last night made for some interesting television viewing. There was the impossible to believe or accept – by anyone rational, that is – uproar surrounding the Don Imus matter. And there was the excruciatingly long – anyone remember that “old document” and something about “right to a speedy trial” – overdue dropping of rape charges against the Duke University Lacrosse Team Three. I’ve frankly never heard anything like it. Many words with which to describe the affair come to mind. Closing my eyes and poking at the list, I choose “despicable.” That’ll do – nicely.

The principals last night were many, however, and there was much to be learned. First, one needs to remind himself of Operation Mockingbird. For those here for the first time, Mockingbird was the Central Intelligence Agency program designed to co-opt and gain control of the news media, in order to acquire control of public opinion. The “dumbing-down” of the citizenry here was an integral part of and goal of that program. Mockingbird was initiated in the early 1950s. When you have reminded yourself of the march of technology, open-heart surgery and transplants, stem-cell technology, man landing on the moon, and the like, it should tell you all you require to recognize what follows here.

Let me pause parenthetically, however, to remind you also that during all of the few days since the Imus and Duke University matters reared their ugly heads, literally scores of people – among them our own citizens, persons “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” - were brutally killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You make your own comparisons of the media responses to the several things. It should also let you recognize that of which I speak.

First among the principals I referred to a minute ago was a man named Steve Capus, identified by the host of the TV Show I was watching as “NBC News President.” The host did not say “man.” Good thing - that would have done it for me. This gutless, metrosexual creep sat there cringing cravenly and protecting his canary balls as he bowed down to his god - money and the opinion of the mob by which he gains it. To call that thing “man” would have make me puke. Jesus! –What a spectacle!

Now, I should point out here, too, that up to about two months or so ago, I didn’t know who the hell Don Imus was, and had never seen or heard him. My interests in the whole matter have to do with what is represented by his case, which is perhaps the differential limit of the pace at which our society and its societal mind has been deteriorating. We have as a nation and society been reduced to the childish.

“Mommy, Donnie called me a bad word.”

It reminds you of the two-year old whose temper tantrum held up that airline flight awhile back, and if you believe this of the entire Afro-American community, the mental Operation Mockingbird conditioning of your mind has you in roughly the mental state of a monkey. As I say, there are Ed Bradleys and then there are Jesse Jacksons. When the hell will you learn enough history to recognize “divide and conquer?”

But then, there are Crystal Gail Mangums, too. Unless the North Carolina system of justice – cut and paste with the appropriate comas here everything I said about Steven Capus - changes its mind (I keep hitting these words somehow made provocative last night; this one is laughable), the only justice (b-a-a-a-r-f-f) she will face is the public exposure of her name and the revelation to all the stunned and stupefied nation that, if she had had her way, three young men innocent of any guilt would have been sent to prison.

How many would that have been? Who knows? All we can know, now, is why.

“Why” is the rest of the principals in the two matters. First, of course, and having to do with the curmudgeonly Imus, are the Reverends, the one who is the randy demagogue and the one who is the Judas Goat for anyone stupid enough to be his follower.

Then there are the baying hounds and harrying harpies who have suddenly gone significantly silent. Too many to list here, in point of fact, the filth-feeding frenzies of the kind excited by the possibility (probability, actually; as I said yesterday, hate and smut sells) of television fame and fortune went on for weeks. These were just about without exception identifiable by the sexist and racist biases anyone observing news events in the past three or four decades would recognize immediaqtely. Things that sell must be made very public, after all.

The only males willing to condemn the Duke Lacrosse players without a single scintilla or shred of evidence, for instance, were black. The rest were women. Among the men – again I use the word merely to identify gender; guys like this wouldn’t make that pimple on a real man’s ass my grandfather used to speak of – was one named Anthony B. Bradley. A man – gender only again – is often best condemned by his own words, and these will do (yes, out of context – but these epitomize the rest):

“What is desperately needed is a hero to emerge from Duke’s lacrosse team, one who is committed to justice and human dignity, to make what may be the toughest decision of his life—that is, to tell the truth.

“There must be at least one man on the team whose conscience is ablaze at the flammable injustice of what he saw, heard, or knows and wants to stand up and shout, ‘ENOUGH!! Here’s what really happened’.”

There were many more like Bradley, the Reverends, for instance (ask yourself what kind of religion it is that guys like this preach).

Chief priestess of the harpies declaiming against the Duke Three was the Satanic-looking Nancy Grace. The shear rabidity of this strange women is downright unsettling, scary (how the hell do these so obviously flawed people get where they are?). Frankly, parenthetically, I sense emotional scars from something in her past. At one point in the cacophony and uproar in the aftermath of “the victim’s” charges against the players, I swear I thought the woman had become unhinged, even intimating not only that no trial of the accused players was necessary, but holding that due process would somehow be offensive to all women. It’s hard to pick anything that would synopsize the blabber of this bilious broad, but this is exemplary.

This was March 31, 2006, from a CNN transcript:

GRACE: “OK, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let’s go out to Dave Foley, defense attorney. Don’t move, Kevin Miller! David Foley, if they’re innocent, why not cooperate? Why stall? Why did they have to have a court order for 46 or 47 lacrosse members to give DNA? It’s very simple. You take something that looks like a Q-tip. You swab the inside of your mouth. It’s nothing more than like a doctor looking for a sore throat. Why? Why wouldn’t they give their DNA? Let’s think about it, Dave Foley! Give me your best shot.”

DAVE FOLEY, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: “Well, Nancy, in terms of this, we’re dealing with young people, OK, who are not necessarily familiar with the law, number one. So they need to have their legal rights...”

GRACE: “You’re kidding, right?

FOLEY: “... protected...”

GRACE: “You’re -- you’re kidding?”

FOLEY (astonished): “No, I’m not kidding.”

Friend, if that doesn’t raise the hair on your neck, nothing will. And that was the only the glint on the tip of the iceberg that is the rest of her haranguing for the mob. More excerpts like this one can be found at:

http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/2006/09/hag-of-hoax-nomination-nancygrace.html

Here’s a sample, also from a CNN transcript - May 11, 2006 - and on the website just cited: Grace’s insanely bloviating and babbling cheerleading for the prosecution reached its peak the day specious news of fingernail DNA from one of the accused players was supposedly leaked to the media. The gimlet-eyed former DA even went so far as to gleefully declare, “Touchdown!"

GRACE: “Well, it all looked bleak for the prosecution of the Duke lacrosse team multiple rape case. At the 11th hour, suddenly, a Hail Mary pass was thrown, and it’s a touchdown for the state! Apparently, DNA matching one of these three lacrosse players has turned up under the nails of the student-turned-stripper.-----“

(Hal’s note: compare this with the uproar over Don Imus having called a basketball team “ho.” Which is more serious? Which more damaging? Need I say, “I rest my case?”). Continuing:

GRACE: “... that there is her positive identification of three of the suspects, 100 percent, 100 percent and 90 percent, that the timeline fits with her story, and the rape kit nurse says she saw signs of recent anal and vaginal trauma consistent with rape. Am I missing something?------“

(Hal’s note: need I say more? “Ho” was more damaging and dangerous than this? Who’s kidding whom?_

GRACE: “And now, of course, we know the allegations that this young lady changed her story were completely false. To Stephen Miller, Duke student and executive of the Duke Conservative Union, all right, so the allegation she changed her story, false. We now have 100 percent identifications of two people, and now there’s DNA. So have you filed your transfer papers yet?”

(Hal’s note: tell me how more wrong – and malicious – you can be._

That’s enough of that - the obnoxious and inimical-to-everything-either –Constitutional-or-complimentary to her gender character of her television persona being familiar to everyone who watches. There were more - many, many more – members of the quasi lynch mob. How about New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts.

"The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke's lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.

"Something happened March 13, when a woman, hired to dance at a private party, alleged that three lacrosse players sexually assaulted her in a bathroom for 30 minutes. According to reported court documents, she was raped, robbed, strangled and was the victim of a hate crime. She was also reportedly treated at a hospital for vaginal and anal injuries consistent with sexual assault and rape.

"Players have been forced to give up their DNA, but to the dismay of investigators, none have come forward to reveal an eyewitness account.

"Maybe the team captains are right. Maybe the allegations are baseless.

"But why is it so hard to gather the facts? Why is any whisper of a detail akin to snitching?"

Then, there were columnists, bloggers, and writers like Kimberly Guilfoyle, Georgia Goslee, Wendy Murphy, and a host of others. For a sampling of the harpy lynch mob, here are a number of forums, with long threads of exemplary commentary. Like I said, nothing convicts anyone like his own words:

http://www.acton.org/ppolicy/comment/article.php?article=320

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/murphys-latest.html

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/goslee-files.html

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/02/graceless.html

Murphy, in particular, is, like Nancy Grace, hung out to dry. A few minutes ago, appearing on an MSNBC (Tucker Carlson) show, Murphy betrayed the fang-baring fear of a cornered wolf bitch. She knows she’s “dead.” For an adjunct professor of law at New England School of Law who is often a guest “analyst” (that’s a fraud in itself, inasmuch as the individuals function solely as actors reading the script provided them by those who hired them), Murphy displayed astonishing dopiness, pillorying the athletes and making it very clear that in her professional opinion as a former prosecutor, they were guilty. Only ideological fervor can explain blind, driven behavior like this. It’s amazing, but it is very familiar, these days.

And, it’s perhaps the best look possible at the reason we have jailed hundreds – and probably thousands of innocent men now proved not guilty by DNA testing, have particularly a look at:

http://blackfeminism.org/index.php/2006/03/28/duke-u-lacrosse-team-rape-case/

Of course, all this is all military industrial complex deception, the smoke and mirrors kind, and the raisson d’etre now for the nation’s news media. Like the perversion of the tabloid newspapers, the eighth-grade level, mind-numbing daytime soap operas and their sex and violence minimalist night-time counterparts, and patently absurd “reality” shows elsewhere on television, the theatrical side of Operation Mockingbird bombards the public with behaviorist-designed propaganda assaults on the public consciousness. In battlefield tactics, the strategy is that of the diversion.

In this, the latest sally for the Mockingbird technicians, the tactic is three-layered, serving two purposes and deceiving two sectors of the society by playing one against the other while stealing the public blind or selling them out to the highest bidder. Using the hatred it has carefully cultivated for decades like an orchestra conductor his baton, the government media conceals the horrendous legal implications of the feminist and racist frenzy resulted from the Duke Lacrosse Team matter with that of the new media feeding frenzy surrounding Don Imus. Playing the black community like a violin, and demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton like a pigeon-drop scammer his mark, the Mockingbird media keeps the public hypnotized.

Their country and nation dissolving around them, “Americans” can find nothing better to do than shout child-like insults over child-like affairs. “Mommy, he called me a name.”

The sad, very sad, aspect of the Imus case is the fact, incontrovertible but apparently totally incomprehensible to the black community, that everything being said by their purported and supposed representatives and spokesman, supports – even confirms – everything being alleged concerning them by their racist enemies. The black reaction to this is just what I’ve already said. “Mommy, he called me a name.” Folks, that’s NOT the reaction of the mature and grown-up – individual or culture. I sincerely agonize for you.

Meanwhile, the killing in Iraq went on. With the flow-strip at the bottom of the screen un-commenting, I went to the computer to learn of the latest figures. It’s a full-fledged civil war now, incidentally, a slaughter. The Congress went on dithering and faking their continual for decades now quarrel (remind you of anything else here?), criminals of all manner and description continued to pour across our border with Mexico, victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita languished in the desperate straits they were found in at the time immediately after the storms, the gap between the poor being purchased at their expense by the thirty-five thousand lobbyists being pandered to by our representatives, our kids continued their accelerating dive into mindless degeneracy, and the nation’s males learned that their freedom is no more certain than the word of a prostitute stripper.

But Don Imus got fired for saying “ho.” Wait till Santa Claus gets caught. That’ll really be something to watch.

The picture is a copy of art by Frank Frazetta.

I wrote yesterday about hate. This morning, the media’s prurient interest in Anna Nicole Smith satisfied, famed lawyer Gerry Spence’s “Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power have raced to the next possible filth-feeding frenzy to the matter of Don Imus having said, “Ho.” Even I - cynical, anti-social SOB that I am – find hard to believe what’s going on. Damn – are we sick!

Rita, my schoolteacher wife, promises to find out for me to what “nappy-headed” may refer. It won’t be hard – she hears the same thing Imus said literally dozens of times a day from students in the middle school were she teaches English. No one heard using the expression, incidentally, is in any danger of being expelled or even disciplined for use of the term. Prayer to a god, on the other hand, might do it.

Odd, what? An hour ago, waiting for traffic at a stop sign beside a car, I hear a “rapper” on the car’s sound system say the word “ho” seven times (that after I started counting). Did I say “odd?”

So why is brother Imus in such hot water? Well, as I said, I spoke of that yesterday. Hate is the reason. More specifically, the fact that hate sells as nothing else, even that so-called “music,” rap.

Earlier by a few minutes, I commented on a forum, thread, or whatever the correct term is here (you’ve got to watch your terminology, these days, you know; say anything useful to one of our demagogues or special interest groups, you’re in big – Don Imus style – trouble), my comment having to due with the already explosive topic of rape. This is what I said (I corrected a couple of “typos”):

“As a retired (formally and partially, actually) Private Investigator (that’s not right, either – but it’s the term you’ll understand) my interest in the subject here is one spanning several decades. Then, too, I wrote on my "blog" yesterday about hate. It's hard to overlook the hate lurking behinds the words many purported rape counselors use. This is an example. Here’s some of what I said:

“If the definition of rape given here is correct, then I was raped when I was thirteen or so, and the story is in my recent book. The four men caught me during one of my habitual walks by the river back home, and it was several hours before I escaped by diving into the river. One result of the incident was the physical strength and fitness regimen I put myself on, a regimen that ultimately would lead to two U.S. National Judo Championships. I learned, in other words, to fight.

“Each year at county fair time (the men were carnie workers), I would go back to the river where the men camped, to watch them. Unfortunately, the next year, I was forced to watch - still too puny to do anything - as the men caught the Native American wife of a trapper who lived nearby. All I could do, as I say, was watch.

“I should have said all I had the courage to do was watch. The humiliation of that probably provided greater impetus for my training than anything else.

“Grown strong beyond anything most people would believe, I caught the men one day at their usual annual campsite. The story's in my book, and it tells how I killed the four men, ground them up, and fed their remains to a herd of pigs nearby.

“Not a good thing, everyone will say. That's the trouble, part of it, anyway. "They" won't know the circumstances. Their ethics and morality isn’t written in a few lines, or words, even.

“It happens that, once I had begun professional forensic investigation work, I undertook to find out for myself the truth about rape. Part of my research was to contact and interview with twenty-five women who had reported rape that resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of the men accused. That, many years before DNA testing, also had a lot to do with my subsequent training and attitudes – those you’re now reading about now.

“One woman, whose testimony led to the imprisonment for forty years of four men (one who had been impotent from puberty - another story), told me at length that "maybe they didn't know it was rape." To my astonished response, the obvious – I trust – question, she said, "In the final analysis, that's up to the woman - isn't it?"

“Yes, I know. Nothing I have written about in the past several years has brought me more hate mail. Hate is how we deal with most things in the U.S., and what I really want to write about here.

“Oh, incidentally, twelve of the fifteen rape cases I worked resulted in dismissal of charges, acquittal, or reduction of the charge. It was the local prosecutor's call to the IRS that resulted in destruction of my business, and it was my having reneged on my promise to stop PI work that brought the second attack from IRS and a repeat of their depredations against me, my wife, and family. Two marriages went with the businesses, my son attempted suicide three times, and I lost my family.

“Rape charges can go much further than putting an innocent man in prison, you know. That's true, perhaps, of any subject that so lends itself to hatred.

“I'll write more in my ‘blog.’”

There, that’ll do it. An object lesson in how (even, perhaps, why) to do “reconnaissance by fire.” That, for the uninitiated, means to shoot in order to see if anyone shoots back. If the past is any indication, the blizzard of mindless invective and verbalized hate will be phenomenal. It’ll be, hopefully, worth it.

The reason I’ve picked the topic is that few of such results in more kinds of responsive hate than that of rape. When William Congreve (or was it Alexander Pope?) observed that “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” he forgot about woman raped (assuming, of course, that – “male chauvinist” that he must have been – he didn’t equate the two).

Oops! – One thing, first. I should think it goes without saying that rape is evil. I would have said “unspeakably evil” but in view of the fact that it seems we hardly speak of anything else these days, that might sound a little silly. I’ve already remarked here that I would be happy to be selected as the executioner who dispatches to his eternal reward the pedophile who abuses children, and the SOB who by force imposes any of his sick behaviors on another isn’t far behind where my contempt – let’s call it what it is, fear - is concerned.

But stop and think about that. More, let’s assume that the essay to which I refer here is correct when it says, “rape has little to do with sex.” If that’s true, then forcing someone to accept attack – right term? – with the sex organ is no different in its essence than forcing with a gun someone to surrender his money, or accept punches, kicks, and all that. Forcing someone to work for nothing is the same crime, isn’t it? So is the fact that the “weapon” is a male organ (see me tippy-toeing around the verbal mines) different? If a man uses the threat of using his sex organ to demand and obtain money from a woman, what, exactly, crime has been committed?

Try to imagine a guy robbing a bank by threatening the woman teller with his – “tool,” shall we say? – and we’ve reached reductio ad absurdum (to say nothing of a little comic relief). But what’s the crime? Is it a sex crime? Will the penalty be worse? I hope you can explain why.

Then why, in the essay here, all the rest? Why the tone, the obvious rancor? Am I more or less “humiliated” because the weapon was a club, knife, or gun, and what I had to do was surrender my property, or my services other than sexual? Why isn’t anyone raging on a regularly continual basis about robbery in general? Slavery (no, the current version – not what happened to your ancestors)? How about being sent to Iraq for the third time?

Those astute enough know where I’m going; in fact, they’re already there. The others can’t be helped, not even answered – and I haven’t much time for that kind. “The only thing that will argue with a jackass, my grandfather was wont to say, “is another jackass.”

My interest is hate, anyway, not rape (not even so much, these days, sex). Gerry Spence’s book was about the way hate sells. My blog was about the way it can be used by CIA-U.S. Government Operation Mockingbird technicians like Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, Nancy Grace, Rosie O’Donnell (sorry I can’t remember more of those from that side of the screaming match, but I pay very little attention to the liberals these days), and the rest. Suffice it to say in that regard that hate is used pretty much the same way lurid sex is. It SELLS.

And it motivates. It blinds the hater to everything but what he has been induced to hate. I quoted historian William L Shirer yesterday, and one quote is salient in the way it relates here. Shirer tells of meeting well-educated and intelligence individuals, hearing them mouth the most outlandish assertions. “It was obvious,” he says, “that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspaper” (remember, there was no television then).

How do you get the most intelligent people in society to “mouth” “nonsense?” How do you get what was then – may still be, actually – the intellectually brightest culture and nation on the planet (Germans invented physics, among several other things our lives depend upon today, you know) to goose-step, scream “sieg heil,” and attempt genocide?

In answer, of course, you could have the purveyors of federal propaganda and Operation Mockingbird mind and opinion-control devilment in our own country tell you – they’ve mastered it and used it against you for more than half a century now. But, of course, if you ask them to tell you how it’s done, they won’t. It’s a secret.

How do you get people who fairly worship democracy (at least pay it adulatory lip-service) to simultaneously worship hate and its purveyors? Democracy, you know – “the noble calling,” Gerry Spence calls it in his new book - has for its sine qua non (the Latin means “without which nothing”) the willingness of people of different views to practice their beliefs in peace, and let everyone else do the same.

Let’s use the essay I’ve referred to as an example”

“Rape . . . is the ultimate merging (italics mine) of sex and violence.” Really? So what we’re saying is that without violence, the crime is not rape? And “the ultimate?” What’s the objective here? Everyone conscious and awake knows that rape is a crime. It’s been a crime in most societies for centuries. So why the language? We need to be told again?

In fact, little in the context of that initial sentence is fact. “Male rapists both hate and fear women. They are incapable of having equal relationships with women. Rapists do not like themselves very much. They choose the crime (yes, yes, we know – why repeat it again and again, a propagandist technique invented by the Goebbels I had reference to yesterday in my blog?) of rape as a way to satisfy their need to dominate . . . rapists hold the belief that real men can do anything they want with women. “

Obviously, to anyone knowledgeable, and anyone who doesn’t listen because it gives them some kind of satisfaction, this is more harangue than anything else. It seeks to instill hate. This is Nancy Grace (CNN television) stuff, hatemongering.

“Rape . . . is a weapon a rapist uses to degrade and humiliate victims in order to feel powerful and masterful over another person.” I can, as can many, think of twenty words one could substitute here for the word “rape,” without changing the truth of the sentence – if that’s how you view it. Or that’s what’s been done to you. For the word “rape,” substitute “kidnapping,” for instance.

I trust I can rest my case at this point, without going further with analysis of what is clearly an attempt to arouse hatred as much as anything else. I can tell you as an investigator of fifteen years experience on the subject of rape that “all rapists” do not intend to “degrade” or “humiliate,” anyone. Several with whom I spoke said they were starving men stealing food, or the like. One guy, at first a “flasher” who “did his thing” in the hopes that a woman would want what he was showing her (his method was to ring the door bell and demonstrate when the prospective object of his twisted affections answered), finally was charged with attempted rape once he had actually grabbed the woman in an apparent effort to convince her. Barry’s technique may have been more than a little clumsy, but it wasn’t about “degradation” or “humiliation.” Not his victim’s anyway. The fact is that were prosecutors limited to the arguments and definitions provided by the author of the essay in question, they would be able to charge only a small, very small, percentage of rapists with rape.

“Barry,” by the way, killed himself.

This is, as I said, the hatemongering of a Nancy Grace (and anyone who needs to assess further why it scares me need only to watch her shows for a month or so). And, this is how the masters and purveyors of hate, do it. It’s how a nation is controlled, and led like a lynch mob to a killing – in this case, it’s own. This is the reason we, the nation, are hiding our faces in shame as one after the other men imprisoned for years for rape are incontrovertibly proved to be innocent by DNA tests.

This is also the reason that we are in Iraq, doing despicable things. Recall for me the rhetoric immediately after 9-11. Go back, copy some of the hatemongers’ words – I’ve given you the names of most of the leading lights there; just add that of your president – and compare them with those quoted here above.

Nice word, “terrorist,” isn’t it? How about “rapist?” That better?

P.S. As I finish this, the radio announces that rape charges against the three Duke University Lacrosse players - I trust everyone reading here remembers how it all occurred, and how the media "reported" the story - have been dropped. "Ravenqueen," "Eyes Wide Open," and others on the Truthout Forum will no doubt also remember - including what I said in writing there. Readers here might find the discourse enlightening. It'll sound familiar, now that you've read this, my latest comment on "rape."

I would be interested to hear what everyone thinks should be done about the Duke Players' accuser, to say nothing about the accusers of all the men recently freed by DNA testing. I'd also like any comment or explanation concerning what HAS occurred in that regard. Has anyone ever heard of a woman who falsely accused a man of rape being charged with anything?

In no instance of any of the men I proved innocent of the rape charges brought against them was a woman charged with any crime. "'Splain dat to me, Luci."

For some time here, and elsewhere on the Internet, I’ve been discussing the rapid mental metastasis of the society. It seems I have something of a comrade in arms now, none other than the redoubtable Gerry Spence. Arguably the best trial lawyer in our history, Spence’s latest book is a sociological polemic so powerful, and so interesting that I read it in just two sittings. Never have I ever met anyone with whom I agree so totally. Reading “Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power” was like listening to my own thought processes.

In fact, there’s a problem with that. Plagiarism. Spence and I are evidently so alike in our thought and opinions that someone will inevitably accuse me of plagiarism. Gerry is famous, I’m not. But I wrote “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story” two years ago, I’ve been writing my “Mongoose Tactic” blog for several years now, and it’s all a matter of record. I also happen to think that Gerry Spence is a man of honor, like myself. That’ll do.

“Bloodthirsty,” written in the terse, yet chatty manner characteristic of his courtroom style, is prefaced with a first chapter entitled “Hate Sells.” The cover of his book is emblazoned with caricatures of the high priests of today’s Orwellian Newspeak, Nancy Grace (Grace? Jesus! – the way chaotic co-incidence sometimes works!), Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Pat Robertson, and I suppose the fact that Spence hasn’t included Sean Hannity in the cohort of Attila the Hun wannabes on the cover is more due space constraints than the more obvious considerations. The people who sell hate, after all, are almost as numerous electronically as those who prostitute – that’s sell, too, you know – sex with pornography.

But there you have it. I don’t really believe these people are real. Nobody is that stupid. These are thespians, actors hired to play a part. They’re selling, all right, and the great lawyer’s thesis is that because it’s massively profitable, the “new conservatives” do everything they can to stir up hatred – it sells television time, books they write, and furthers their commercial interests. The stations who “pimp” – Spence’s term – them to the public are likewise far more interested in their bottom line than in the nation’s health.

Surprise! As Johanna, heroine of my novel, says, “Never trust a capitalist – everything’s for sale.”

Incidentally, have you ever wondered how somebody who spews vicious and hyperbolic nonsense like these people came to be called “conservative?” I can remember when conservative meant restrained, careful, cautious; moderate (perish the ugly thought!), even.

Gerry Spence has it, right on the proverbial button. But there’s more, I think – much more. The lawyer doesn’t seem to be aware of - doesn’t mention it anywhere, anyway - CIA Operation Mockingbird. The brainchild of a man named Frank Wisner, director of what was then in the Central Intelligence Agency called the Office of Plans, Mockingbird was the plan to take control of the nation’s news media. I spoke recently of Mockingbird and federal programs designed and intended to “dumb-down” the nation, readers to my website will recall, and while my website delineates the operation more completely elsewhere, it will suffice here to synopsize. In fact, we may as well go back to the guy who originated it all.

Control of the news media by a government has just one purpose, propaganda. Josef Goebbels was Reichsminister der Propaganda for Adolf Hitler and the man who brought the Fuehrer to power, and Gerry Spence devotes Chapter Eight in his book to “The Ghost of Goebbels, Propaganda and the Rock-Hard Right.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Reichsminister might, though. “Propaganda is a means to an end,” he pontificated. “Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow it to willingly and without internal resistance devote itself to the task and goals of a superior leadership.

“In the end, such propaganda miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people. A government that uses it properly can do what is necessary without running the risk of losing the masses . . .’

“The effective propagandist must be a master of the art of speech, of writing, of journalism, of the poster, and of the leaflet. He must have the gift to use the major methods of influencing public opinion such as the press, film and radio to serve his ideas and goals.”

Goebbels, the master of deceit nonpareil, went on: “The rank and file are usually much more primitive that we imagine. Propaganda must therefore be simple and repetitious . . . it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

If you don’t, in that, recognize today’s television – watched by people in the Land of the Free for hours every day – you’re brain-dead. Just what you’re intended to be. How many times have you heard “FoxNews – fair and balanced, as usual”?

“Think of the press as a great keyboard,” Reichsminister Goebbels said, “on which the government can play.” It was only a co-incidence, I suppose, that Frank Wisner saw Operation Mockingbird (“cute” – meaning ironic or cynical - names for operations were much in vogue, then) as a means by which to “orchestrate” - one of his favorite, if not characteristic, words – public opinion. Another of Wisner’s brainchilds, Radio Free Europe, he called his “Mighty Wurlitzer . . . you don’t even have to play – you just put in a nickel.”

Let’s back up a little – “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” as the overture to the old Lone Ranger radio program once ran. In 1933, the same year (by ugly co-incidence) the Lone Ranger radio program was inaugurated, Germany was a dismal place, in an economic depression even worse – it that’s possible – than that of the United States then. In Germany, the “greater champion of justice” (also lines from our radio program’s overture) was a guy called “der Fuehrer,” and it’s how he came to power that’s interesting for our purposes here.

Pay attention, now. The president of Germany then was an old – very old – general named Hindenburg. Under enormous pressure to do something – anything - about Germany’s plight, the president appointed Adolf Hitler German Chancellor. Now, Hitler’s political position was pretty tenuous, at best. The Nazi Party had only 44% of the total vote despite the suppression of the opposition press (italics mine) and the monopoly the NSDAP enjoyed on the state radio during the previous election campaign. Its two hundred, eighty-eight seats combined with fifty-two Nationalist seats gives Hitler's government a bare sixteen seat majority.

In other words, Hitler had won election by the proverbial skin of his teeth. Remind you of anything? Keep reading.

Hitler had been sworn into power in January, 1933. A month later – still paying attention? – the Reichstag – it amounts to our capitol building – burned to the ground. A disaster – right? Guess what. The Communist Party, the Nazis chief rival for election to power, was implicated. William L Shirer, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” the definitive history of Germany at the time, tells it like this:

“The coincidence that the Nazis found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible, but it is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire almost certainly originated at the top with Goebbels and Goering . . . it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire.”

There’s more, too. “Goering knew,” Shirer goes on, and quoting an official at the time, “exactly how the fire was to be started and ordered the official, ‘to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it.’”

How about that – a disaster just in the nick of time! I don’t suppose that reminds you of anything.

Well, how about this: Hitler and Company still had much to do. The Treaty of Versailles that followed World War One forbade Germany a military of any kind, and you can’t rule the world without an army. Then, too, another of Hitler’s goals was to eradicate the people he hated more than anything on earth – that’s the Jews - and the Jews were scattered all over Europe. No army, and enemies of the German people – notice that I didn’t call them “terrorists”; mustn’t be suggestive, here - scattered everywhere.

What to do? Well, among the first things the Nazis did for the German people was assure by providing a cheap, yet efficient radio that each home had one. In a trice, the nation of Germany went from suspicion of the Jewish people among them, to screaming hatred toward them.

Then, lo and behold, there was discovered a plot to attack Germany; no, not the Jews – Poland. Hitler ordered Germany onto wartime footing – a German company named Krupp was the Halliburton (was that suggestive?) of the time, and attacked Poland. Everyone in German wondered why the hell they were attacking the Poles, when all along it had been Jews the Nazis blamed for all the trouble in Germany, but the Fuehrer was their guy, and he said the Poles were preparing to attack.

“Weapons of mass destruction” in German is Waffen der Massenzerstörung. Just thought you’d like to know.

Now, mind you – and just because I have that picture of the World Trade Center with the “Dog didn’t bark” quote from the Sherlock Holmes Adventure of the Silver Blaze beside it on my website – I make no suggestion that the administration’s – Bush, I mean – explanation of who was to blame for 9/11 was similarly invented. That’s exactly how Gerry Spence put it, too. Like I said, we think almost exactly alike. There are co-incidences all over the place, these days – aren’t there?

Like the great lawyer, I also observe “only” that the U.S. public accepted the government’s explanation for the World Trade Center attack in much that same manner the German people in 1933 accepted their government’s explanation for the Reichstag fire. I might even say the same thing about the way the public here accepted the Bush Administration’s explanation for invading Iraq and the way Germany’s people accepted their government’s invasion of Poland.

But I wouldn’t, because to say that would be much too heavy-handed. Assuming you’re smart enough to make a sandwich, you were probably ahead of me, anyway. If you weren’t, you may want to consider getting help.

At any rate, of course, World War ensued, killing a whole hell of a lot of people – and I’ll let you figure our which war it is I’m talking about. It might not make any difference to you, actually - “America” these days being what it is.

Let’s change the subject. Today’s news is about another one of the “N-Word” things. Somebody has done it again: a couple of vocal fricatives, one or two glottal stops, and the nation is seething from coast to coast, border to border, with hate. A talk-show guy named Imus said the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team was a bunch of what you can hear just about every time a kid playing rap “music”(?) on his car disk player pulls up beside you at the stop light. That the horrible word was invented - “Ebonics,” I think it was called then - by the minority group now so offended and incensed by its use, and is used by them with absolutely relentless continuality and in every form of entertainment in which they indulge, seems to have escaped everyone.

Nevertheless, as Gerry Spence says, hate sells. And here is a chance to sell hate, umbriago! Don Imus should be executed, his family banished from our fair nation, his property burned, and the land it once occupied plowed up and seeded with salt, in order that nothing ever grow there again. The Imus name should be expunged from public record. Can you think of anything else? Never fear, the Rose O’Donnell-Ann Coulter hatemongering types will. Count on it.

A single, one-syllable word!

And, you probably haven’t noticed – but I’ll do it for you – twelve of our soldiers and literally scores of Iraq’s citizens were killed in Iraq the day Imus or whatever his name is said that awful word. Here you are, your country engaged in what historians will almost certainly call the most ill-conceived and miserably prosecuted war in history, running on account of that war and the FUBAR government you have on an economic treadmill you no longer have an ice cube’s in hell’s chance of leaving or surviving, with illegal immigrant criminals pouring into the country under government auspices, and all the rest, and you’re agonizing over a word? Jesucristo!

Hate not only sells, Mr. Spence, hate is a wonderful behavioral tool by which to stupefy a public, to render them, in the words of the poet, ‘stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox.” The guy who sired Anna Nicole Smith’s baby is about to be determined, and the administration needs another distraction. Operation Mockingbird, and the power of the propaganda will supply it, you can bet on that. When Don Imus has joined Keith – or whatever the hell his name was – Richards on the sacrificial racist, sexist, bigot, whatever-the-hell-have-you altar orchestrated by the Mighty Wurlitzer, we will go back to the Mutt and Jeff, Bad Cop-Good Cop routine between the Congress and the White House. Watching dutifully as each of the malicious miscreants spouts his phony but fulminating fury, our heads will swing back and forth like spectators at a tennis match.

Even when disaster is upon us – remind yourself of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans – we will sit swinging mindlessly back and forth like pendulums. Bet on it. The Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power will see to it.