THINGS SLIP IN WITHOUT ANYBODY NOTICING

In a recent Newsweek article (July 19, 2004) entitled, “The Dots Never Existed”, we learn once more that pressure from above created the impetus for the intelligence community to falsify the report which the White House eventually saw. In the article, we learn of an intelligence source who was called “Curve Ball" because so much of what he reported was considered suspect. Seems a Pentagon intelligence analyst wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official which warned about the unreliability of Curve Ball. The CIA man wrote back, “Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say. The powers that be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about.”

Is it clear, now, how pressure from the Bush Grayhouse forced a distortion of the truth so that Bush could have his war? Let us also never forget that America and the world did have intelligence sources on the ground and openly in Iraq to report on WMDs. They were called U.N. weapons inspectors, but Bush didn’t want to hear what they were telling him—i.e. that no WMDs were to be found. So was it Bush’s pressure from above that forced a false report to come back up to him from intelligence officials? You can’t tell me that a lower level intelligence official is going to lie to the boss on his own initiative.


POOR LITTLE NEW RICH GUY

I’m constantly amazed at how easily we believe rich people who tell us that they deserve to be rich because they’re smarter than the average Joe. That belief clearly comes through when a conservative tells me that if you give every American a million dollars, in the end, all the money will end up back in the hands of the rich.

It seems to me that we have an adequate mechanism to check out this conservative belief. If only I were a strong man in research, I’d find out. We now have thousands of lottery winners. All we got to do is do some research on them and find out how many average Joe’s have lost all their lottery winnings back to the rich, how many are still about even, and how many have increased their windfalls. Hey, somebody, get busy on that research! Please?


DIVORCE IS AS CHRISTIAN AS APPLE PIE

Again, it comes up—this time from an interesting source. In discussion with Bill Moyers about gay marriage (Public TV’s “Now”) Cal Thomas, the fundamentalist columnist, let slip that Christians are divorcing at a higher clip than are non- or, at least, un-churched Christians. I’ve heard it before from other sources. I’m beginning to believe it myself.

Some people would like to claim it’s a failure in Christian or American morality. I’d like to say it’s a healthy dose of reality for evangelicals which signals the emergence of a higher and more modern morality than that old fashioned Bible yoke of marriage. Christian divorce is the result of living in a nation in which “all men” (and women) are created equal and in which both sexes enjoy equal rights to freedom. Like so many Bible truths which enforce the unjustified power of one group over another, the unfair power of men over women in the Christian marriage yoke is falling by the wayside. What woman, raised in a free America, would voluntarily put herself under the boot heel of an insecure, childlike male animal who needs the Bible to prop him up in place? That Christian women are seeing through this farce is to be cheered rather than cursed. Increased Christian divorce is a healthy sign that American freedom is alive and well rather than a sign that the Bible is not being honored.

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"How can I believe in god when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?" —Woody Allen