Well Said

Sorry for the downtime ... my new newspaper job is keeping me busy.

I was reading Slashdot today and discovered a story about how, surprise surprise, the Inspector General of the Homeland Security Department says the Transportation Security Authority (TSA, aka "the airport nazis") lied to the public widely and regularly over the last two years. You can download the report here (PDF file).

Remember, this is our own government saying that the TSA lied. Regularly. Widely. Routinely.

In response to the posting of this item on Slashdot, a poster with the handle "ites" wrote a stunningly concise summary of everything I've been saying politically in this blog for quite a while. Here's his post:

One of the major instruments of the ruling political class is to divide and distract public opinion with intense moral-laden debate about subjects that in most other countries are treated as private matters.

Morality-driven debate is such a powerful tool because you can, by fine-tuning the argument, get a balanced 50-50 split on just about any subject.

And so, we get the endless debates about gay weddings, about living wills, about abortion, about the "theory" of evolution, about the role of religion in public structures, and so on.

Meanwhile debate about subjects that in any open democracy would make the front pages, would bring millions onto the streets, and would topple presidents... almost totally absent.

The general public does not debate the role of the state, the yawning chasms in the democratic process, the boom in military spending, gerrymandering, government-sponsored TV "news", political prisoners, torture, the corruption of every agency meant to protect the public, the environment, the economy into an agency designed to exploit and abuse...

Give the plebians bread, and circuses, and you can pretty much do what you like.

If we don't get serious about ignoring these obvious distractions and start focusing on the real issues before us, America is going to take a fall like it has never before seen. It won't be today, it won't be tomorrow ... but we'll live to see it.