Winter Patriot Community Blog

Thanks for posting this. It seems every time I think things can't get any stranger, another level of strangness is revealed.

Robert Parry, writing recently about our growing strangeness, called it "America's Decoupling from Reality". His piece by that name, posted September 10th, begins like this:

As Election Day 2010 approaches – as the United States wallows in the swamps of war, recession and environmental degradation – the consequences of the nation’s three-decade-old decoupling from reality are becoming painfully obvious.

Yet, despite the danger, the nation can’t seem to move in a positive direction, as if the suctioning effect of endless spin, half-truths and lies holds the populace in place, a force that grows ever more powerful like quicksand sucking the country deeper into the muck – to waist deep, then neck deep.

Trapped in the mud, millions of Americans are complaining about their loss of economic status, their sense of powerlessness, their nation’s decline. But instead of examining how the country stumbled into this morass, many still choose not to face reality.

Instead of seeking paths to the firmer ground of a reality-based world, people from different parts of the political spectrum have decided to embrace unreality even more, either cynically as a way to delegitimize a political opponent or because they’ve simply become addicted to the crazy.

He then explains "how the country stumbled into this morass", and for quite a while his analysis makes good sense. He talks about such powerful factors as the right building a giant media machine that can recycle deliberate lies endlessly, and Clinton-era Democrats letting Reagan-era Republicans off the hook for the crimes of that administration, which included arming terrorists in the Middle East, setting up death squads in Central America, and smuggilng drugs to pay for it all.

And he goes on and on, and you can start nodding, and maybe even nodding off, until you get to the section he calls "Aping the Right", which starts like this:

After watching the success of the Bush administration’s propaganda, some on the Left decided that their only hope was to give the neocons a taste of their own disinformation medicine.

Though the 9/11 evidence pointed to Bush’s incompetence in ignoring warnings and failing to stop al-Qaeda’s terrorist operation, some American leftists felt that it wasn’t enough to convince the people that Bush was simply a bonehead. The feeling was that Bush had so bamboozled the people that they needed to be shocked out of their trances by something bigger.

So, this small group brushed aside the evidence-backed narrative of Bush’s incompetence and even a competing interpretation of that factual framework, claiming that Bush had “let 9/11 happen.” Instead, this group insisted that the only way to wake up America was to make a case that Bush “made it happen,” that he was behind the 9/11 attacks.

To accomplish this feat, these activists, who became known as “9/11 truthers,” threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they indeed had done it. The "truthers" then cherry-picked a few supposed “anomalies” to build an “inside-job” story line.

The “truthers” even recycled many of the Right’s sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence. These sleight-of-hand techniques obscured the glaring fact that not a single witness has emerged to describe the alleged “inside job,” either the supposed “controlled demolition” of the Twin Towers or the alleged “missile” attack on the Pentagon.

Some supporters of the “inside-job” theory may have simply been destabilized by all the years of right-wing disinformation. Reality and real evidence may have lost all currency, replaced by a deep and understandable distrust of the nation's leaders and the news media.

Other "truthers" whom I’ve talked with view their anti-Bush propaganda campaign as a success because it injected some doubts among the American people about Bush. One told me that this was the only attack line against Bush that had gained any “traction.”

I am tempted to try to count the lies in the last-quoted passage, but I think I have to go throw up first.

When and if future historians honestly chart the sinking of American journalism, the once-great "invesitigative journalist" Robert Parry will have to be considered a hunk of lead.

parry is subject to the very unreality he analyses in others but fails to see that he too swims in it. The irony is that its the neocons and their media that condition what Parry believes...they create the unreality from their positions of authority.
Parry: 'Some supporters of the “inside-job” theory may have simply been destabilized by all the years of right-wing disinformation. Reality and real evidence may have lost all currency, replaced by a deep and understandable distrust of the nation's leaders and the news media.'

BUT why is Parry believing that very same media and govt?

Someone should ask him what is the evidence al-qaeda did 9-11.
Let him show the evidence that alqaeda ops boarded the atttack planes...video evidence at airport, manifests etc
Ask him why islamic fundamentalists went to a bar and left a koran behind?
Why does the FBI say it has no evidence OBL was involved? What does Parry know that they don't?