America's Matrix--The Right Wing Noise Machine

This wonderful article by Robert Parry in Consortium News will help you sort out the way in which the Right has taken the dominant position in American politics. They've done by ceaseless, tireless, 24/7 lying propaganda financed by terrifying fanatics like Sun Myung Moon and aided and abetted by gutless "reporters" in the mainstream media. The introduction:

On June 1, 2003, I wrote an article entitled “America's Matrix,” questioning claims by the Bush administration that the discovery of two specially equipped train cars was proof that Iraq was secretly manufacturing biological warfare agents.

At the time, more than two months after the Iraq invasion, George W. Bush was getting edgy because the promised stockpiles of banned weapons hadn't materialized. So, on May 29, 2003, he hailed the discovery of the supposed mobile “biological laboratories” as conclusive proof that “we have found the weapons of mass destruction,” a claim that would be repeated by administration officials for the next several months.

But any careful reading of the published intelligence reports about the train cars would have shown Bush's assertion to be just the latest exaggeration of WMD evidence about Iraq. Even the evidence marshaled in a “white paper” by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency fit much better with the explanation that the train cars were designed to produce hydrogen for battlefield weather balloons.

Now, nearly three years later, the Washington Post has published an article revealing that Bush made his flat assertion about the train cars two days after a Pentagon-sponsored mission informed Washington that the trailers had nothing to do with producing biological weapons. Those findings from a nine-member team of U.S. and British scientists and engineers were in a three-page field report -- followed three weeks later by a 122-page final report -- but the contrary information was stamped “secret” and shelved.

As senior administration officials, including the President and Secretary of State Colin Powell, continued to make false claims about the “biological laboratories,” the nine-member team disbanded. “I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated,” one team member told the Post. “It never happened. And I just had to live with it.” [Washington Post, April 12, 2006]

Back in spring 2003, however, the readiness of the Bush administration to mislead the American people and the readiness of the U.S. news media -- and many citizens -- to go along led me to compare what was happening in the United States to the false reality of the Matrix movies.

Go read the rest, and double your resolve to throw these lying bastards out of power as soon as humanly possible.