FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
On the first of this month, I exhorted everyone to read Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC Countdown editorial, and damn me, but I’m only doing it again. Today Olbermann took special time to castigate Bush’s 9/11 antics, and the wretched little ABC/Disney propaganda miniseries that concluded tonight. In conclusion he even went to so far as to cite Rod Serling. Which ain’t bad for cable news....
"This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."
For the whole bit...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

The secret word is Cornfield

THE TWILIGHT ZONE IS ESPECIALLY APT IN THIS CONTEXT AS ALL THE MANUFACTURED 9/11 SPIN AND HOO-HA HAS ONLY SERVED TO DISGUISE THE NEWS THAT CAME WITH YESTERDAYS WASHINGTON POST THAT THE WAR ISN’T ONLY FUCKed UP, BUT POSSIBLY BEING LOST...
"The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.
The officials described Col. Pete Devlin's classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq. "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost."

Wars, I might add that will have resonances that could last for generations, if not centuries. If we have centuries.

OTHER LINKS...
Valleyboy makes a point about James Woods new TV series...
http://www.valleyboy.net/

While blu sends a link to someone who is very concerned about contrails...
http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.com/conchem.html

And shane flipside just has to be read to be believed...
http://shaneshit.blogspot.com/