Anyone remember a man called Charles Stuart? [View All]

This was the guy from Boston, who claimed that unknown black assailants stabbed his wife to death as he took a wrong turn into a black neighborhood.The police cast a wide net to apprehend the perpetrators arresting every black person in sight.Later, Stuart's brother, remorseful, told the police it was all a concocted sham.Charles Stuart saw his wife standing in the way of his desire for the high life and decided to get rid of her to collect insurance. When his story unraveled, he committed suicide jumping off a bridge over the Charles River.

This is not the first time that an innocent black man has been fingered by white criminals;what makes it easy is that people are so easily swayed by their own prejudices that they tend to believe a white criminal over innocent black people.

This story came to me as I think about Bush &Co.'s elaborately constructed stories about 9/11, Iraqi WMD's, Al Qaeda connections, Yellowcake,beheadings of prisoners by Arabs, all smell like the Charles Stuart story.As each layer gets peeled for the fraud that it is, a new 'reality' is created and, in our prejudice, we are willing to give credence to the stories built by Rove, Cheney and other enablers.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but ourselves.