far better than he did.

and throw in some scary speeches from the people you elected. Then your Teevee news and radio hosts and pundits act like they believe there really IS a threat and give the scary speeches and warnings credibility. The least informed and least skeptical will buy it, and then public opinion shifts, and you are ready to go.

as skinner said..... not our skinner
the psy one.

we are supposed to claim that we all were duped, we all voted Yes, not one of us knew any better than Chuck, who we now are supposed to call an opponent of the very war he voted us into.....
I think that part of the flaw in the American cultural character is the rewarding of failure, the shunning and shaming of excellence. Those who were wrong get rewarded, those who were right are forgotten, even the fact that they were right is forgotten.

imagine someone comes to you with some ridiculous statement - "they've found stone buildings on the moon", for instance. of course, even if the speaker is sincere and certain, you would probably scoff. Imagine later the same day, another person with no connection says to you "did you see the pictures of the buildings on the moon?", you would react with interest.

The whole thing has been studied well, and for the most part we all tend toward the gullible; given two independent word-of-mouth sources, most people will come to believe something to be true, or at least come to suspend disbelief. We aren't wired to require evidence, however highly we might esteem our critical faculties.

Language would not have developed as a means to mis-communicate. Lying came later when the technology of language was established enough that one could play with its conventions.

The most basic communications are things like, "There is a wolf behind you" and we are (correctly) programmed to give provisional credence to such communications.

I takes the boy who cried wolf a lot of repetitions to make people tune him out.

That guy who absolutely must be confirmed as Secretary of Defense? Yeah, he was for the Iraq war before he was against it.

Arguably the worst foreign policy blunder in American history and we wanted to be talked into it by a band of not particularly smooth conspirators.

I'm reminded of Twain's War Prayer, nobody listened to the stranger either.

http://eslbee.com/favorites/war_prayer.htm

I remember posting it during the war.

The odd thing with me is that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was oddly a personal acquaintance to the parties involved.

The Morrisons went to my school and his Dad the admiral, played it up in Congress. I meet him and his sons and daughter but not Jim.

Only later did I realize what a lie that was killing my classmates and friends.


I said when the war broke out in Iraq we will win the battles but the peace will be eluding us for years with much hubris and loss. I smelled a rat and was proven right.


I studied the Ancient .Greek wars after that and the misadventures in Sicily.
Hubris.

Ten fucking years.....
and no ending in sight for the never ending war that finances the ever growing military industrial complex and robs this nation of its wealth, hope, freedom and liberties.

We need for bases to cover our bases.

Your government LIES TO YOU. History has proven that.

of evidence that pointed to there being no WMD. But it wasn't an absolute certainty especially since Cheney's minions might have planted something.

Why do you think Cheney outed her via complacent and complicit media? TO STOP HER WORK IN TRACKING WMD'S.

covery. Troops don't always know the govt game-plan.

a known liar, or didnt pay attention to the evidence, then yes you might argue that it wasnt "known". Ignorance is bliss and intentional ignorance is really bliss.

Sen Daschle gave a great speech outlining all the many reasons invading Iraq was a horrible idea. He then cast his principles aside and voted to give Bush, the Dim-Son authority to do what lead to the deaths of close to a million people, mostly innocent.

But the point I got from the OP was that America is a country of instant gratification. We need to punish someone and sometimes anyone will do.

The testimony of Saddam's son in law who defected (which was proved reliable a zillion different ways, and was the basis for dismantling the old WMD programs in the 1990s) made it likely that there were no WMD programs, but it was not known.

But before the invasion the UN inspectors had been in Iraq for a couple of months looking at the sites where people like Cheney "knew" the WMD were, and there was nothing there.

When inspectors are ON THE GROUND searching the sites where we "knew" the WMD were it is right to say that we KNEW there was no threat to America there.

This seems to have gone down the memory hole... we had already looked BEFORE the invasion. There was nothing there that posed a threat to America.

The authority figure d'jour says that all manner of antisocial, illegal and immoral behavior is necessary to preserve your freedom.

Freedom to do what?

The only important freedom is the freedom to say "fuck that". Not in my name.

65% of human beings will administer a lethal electric shock to another, provided they are ordered to do so by someone wearing a suit, lab coat or a uniform.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Those who would not are called liberals.

Yes. The Milgram experiments, along with a dash of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

...a sprinkling of Willie Nelson's classic line "They wouldn't lie to me... not on my own damn teevee!"

And a few other things. I am not very tolerant of previous acquaintances with whom I tried to interest in the possibility we were being lied to. Too many couldn't be bothered. Most of those also couldn't be bothered about torture. It bothers me to have areas of intolerance. Thank goodness I was raised on a mind-bending mix of Twilight Zone and Green Acres.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire

Good thread, cthulu2016.