What are we so fucking afraid of, anyway?

Seriously, here's the part that really amuses me, as far as neocon scumbags like Cheney and Rove working the American people into a cowering frenzy...

Since about 1950 or so, we lived with the threat of being annihilated by Soviet nukes...a very real threat given the nature of their regime.

And yet, we lived on, and dealt with it.

Then, terrorists wreaked some very real havoc in September of 2001, and since that day everyone has been cowering and scared and capitulating.

So if Russia had bombed Atlanta, would we have all cowered and surrendered to them?

WTF?

but repugs would like to continue to use fear as their brickbat.

Kkkarl not being in a prison is why it goes on 24/7 .A think tank of Misanthropes allowed to yell " Fire " in a theater ,protected by Profit and privilege .

allowed to yell " Fire " in a theater ,protected by Profit and privilege ...."


Perfect, just perfect.

:thumbsup:

Fear has taken over. Some is justified, but most is just tactical fear mongering. Where is our 'home of the brave'?

They report WHAT THEY WANT TO REPORT. And that's usually what's best for their parent corporation, which often has lucrative government contracts that they don't want to lose. War is good for General Electric, they make lots of money from it. So why cut off a major source of revenue?

They're making millions from the war, so they continue to report how horrible things are, and how vicious the enemy is, and blah blah blah. They largely ignore how unpopular the war is, but if they do mention it they justify its continuing in the next sentence. There is no fairness, no accountability, and no balance in today's media.

And the American people absorb it like it's the honest truth. We have 24/7 news networks that must fill all that time with something. And if that content helps their parent corporation, well...who's going to get a nice fat raise next time? The good little reporter who ignores the fact that the reported turnout numbers for the tea baggers seem really high compared to what they saw. The good little anchor who keeps reporting to us that Saddam Hussein was somehow behind the 9/11 attacks, and we must remove him from power. The journalist with the network show who allows Dick Cheney to appear and tell outright lies that have already been debunked without challenging him on it.

The media has the power to change public opinion and attitude in this country, and they do not do it in an honest or balanced way. That is why so many more Republicans appear on television to state their side of an issue while Democrats are almost ignored. We hear the message they want us to hear, and that is why things are largely the way they are today.

Consider the news stories that were silenced during the Bush years. Things known before an election that would have negatively impacted the Republicans. They weren't reported on until after the election. And if they had been, the outcome of the election could have changed.

That's why we need to restore the Fairness Doctrine and update it to cover today's circumstances. We have to break up the media conglomerates so there is more diversity in ownership. That way, if one Republican-leaning network chooses to not report something, another one with a different agenda will.

Consider that we have Mrs. Greenspan (Andrea Mitchell - MSNBC), whose husband was involved in so many things that have impacted us, reporting on those things on a network. All without any disclaimer or reminder that she sleeps with the guy who may have been involved to some degree.

CNN anchors are married to big time Republican supporters, and inflict their opinions into news stories, without divulging the fact that they benefit from covering up right wing issues and emphasizing issues on the left.

Things won't change until the whole story is revealed, and with today's self-serving M$M, that isn't going to happen. We need to change the laws and FORCE IT TO HAPPEN.

If it was a PYSOP it was wildly successful. If it wasn't then the perpetrators luckily created just the type of spectacle to shock people to their core.

The images from that day are burned into most American's retinas; the terror they felt—even at a great distance—still seems palpable to them.

Rudy Giuliani (among others) is an example of a politician who has not forgot the power of invoking 9/11 to instill fear.

Just asking the question "To whose benefit?" concerning 9/11 leads to many uncomfortable answers.

And I'd like to know who placed all those Put options and failed to claim the money they'd made? See Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 by Allen M. Poteshman for more information and his deconstruction of the financial event prior to 9/11.

... retaliatory in nature, and not empire's offensive move.

I've told this many times on DU. I was working with a customer from Poland, who lived there during the Iron Curtain days. He said to me; "At least we knew Pravda was bullshit. You Americans have your media and think you are getting real news, but it's nothing but corporate propaganda."

America's MSM is now merely corporate propaganda. The military industrial congressional complex needs the fear to continue to have access to the blank check of our tax dollars.

If science and reason took the place of all this propaganda, we would prioritize based on what kills American's the most. And I would suggest that the 45,000 live we loose every year just from lack of health insurance is a much greater concern to us all than the 3,100 lives we lost once in a once in a century terrorist attack. Heart disease and cancer and poverty and tobacco and corporate processed food kill more in a day than what we lost in 9-11.

In rational terms, the lives lost in 9-11 are a mere drop in a bucket compared to all the other sources of death we all seem to have acclimated to as perfectly acceptable and completely tolerable.

Not to mention the logic of sacrificing 4,200 American military lives, and maybe 900 contractor lives (which show up in no count of war dead I know of) and what, 300,000 injured AMERICAN SOLDIERS and estimated 100,000 to over a million Iraqi dead? And by many estimates, all these fucking wars have not made us any safer. indeed, in my view, America's wars are like poking a terrorist bees nest in terms of unintended consequences.

I sure hope our government "has the imagination" to think about all the unsecured nuclear materials floating around in nuclear black markets since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Thinking in strictly my own self interest, global warming is going to fuck things up beyond comprehension in this century. At 55 with no children, my time on this earth has dodged this bullet. But America's lack of action on global warming is the ultimate fucking up of the unborn that humanity has ever done, in the face of information that we know it's coming. My generation has done a magnificent job of wrecking the American dream and the future for all the younger people of the USA and the world. My bad.

Long after I'm dead, historians, if there is such a thing, are going to realize that Frank Luntz, the Republican PR propagandist, was the root of these past few decades of climate change denial, starting in the early 90's. The ultimate corporate short term decision making, fuck up the whole world and the lives of all six billion on it, in the name of short term profits.

-90% Jimmy

I have said on occasion I have a better chance of dying in a car accident than a terror attack, people look at me like I'm the devil. Oh horror, someone doesn't take the threat seriously. No, I find it a horror that no one really knows if mad cow is in the beef supply. Far more frightening.

They somehow still believe the 'liberal media' lie... and every other lie that comes from the RW noise machine.

Anybody who wasn't a complete idiot (and every country has those) KNEW that the government-controlled press was lying, partly because Pravda and Izvestia were always talking about how wonderful and prosperous everyone was, and the people could see with their own eyes that it wasn't true.

Most people here seem to know that Fox News is a Republican propaganda organ (and the hardcore Republicans like it that way), but they think CNN, CBS, and other corporate media are either "liberal" or centrist. Yet it was during the Reagan administration that I began noticing reporters acting more as stenographers for powerful interests than as journalists and letting public figures get away with outrageous lies.

I've mused somewhat over the role of the "boogieman" in shaping American policies. First, there was the "anarchist" from WWI to WWII. I suspected a lot of this hysteria were propagated to combat the rise of unions. Then came the "communist" following WWII. We lived in constant fear that the "Rooskies" were going to strike at any moment. And the MI complex grew. Well, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we were without a "boogieman." I remember some claiming we would reap a "peace dividend" in that less money was necessary for the MI complex. And I also heard some public figures claim there would be no "peace dividend." They were right: come 1993 we had the first WTC attack. Enter the "terrorist."

Just four short years without a "boogieman."

I've always wondered about how the Berlin Wall fell during Bush the Elder's administration and the first WTC attack occurred just a month or so after he left office.

Then we had the second WTC attack while his son was in office. Coincidence?...:shrug:

The terrorists were not sponsored by Osama bin laden. They were sponsored by dick cheney and the neocons.

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That's who I'm afraid of...

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Thanks, Swamp Rat.

poor=helpless
the fear of being poor=angry/scared