Excuse me but the implication here is that all Democrats and all Republicans agreed. Simply not true. As I recall 22 Democratic and one Republican Senator did not agree and, as I recall, a majority or near majority of House Democrats disagreed.

I am unconvinced that politics is anything more than opinion.

———————

Well, public opinion that 2 and 2 = 4 is pretty strong and it does seem to work for us. Maybe opinion isn’t such a bad thing if it’s well informed.

Part of our continuing problem is that much of the public has been terribly misinformed by the recent change of the mainstream media to prostitution for Neoconservatism and the Bush family mafia. The public hasn’t been well informed by that. Thank god Al Gore invented the Internet and thanks to our hosts for FireDogLake.com.

Perle is shown to be essentially a person whose politics are the “lessons” taken from WW2 and the Holocaust by a subset of Israelis and American Jews. Despite carefully avoiding Hitler and the Warsaw Ghetto in the TV piece, that is really what is there. Hussein is another anti-Semitic dictator out to exterminate Jews educated people, Baghdad is just another Warsaw Ghetto battle where the Jews determined educated people win if we arm them up, militant Muslims are the same thing as militant Nazis, etc.

The problem with this world view is the one we see advocated by Allan Dershowitz, Netanyahu, and a lot of other folks. The belief system has the axiom that creating/maintaining civilization requires a willingness and continued commitment to kill. Rather than civilization being the opposite of murder, it incorporates it as a necessity.

As for Iraq, Perle doesn’t deal with the reality that either a Shia or a Sunni-Shiite shared government involving the present strongmen is the obvious middle term outcome. He prefers to have an American puppet state, basically, or ignores the Iraqis proper entirely. But we already knew that. Too.

Morning all — great post, scarecrow. Am sitting here sipping my coffee, listening to our dachshund snore in her blanket (being an old dog is hard this morning), and wondering whether Richard Perle will ever go away. And, unfortunately, the answer I keep coming up with is “sadly, no.” SIGH

Christy You told me to with hold judgement until after the program when I was going on about Perle the other day. I hit the nail on the head and it was not hard to do.

Perle has shown a habitial pattern of lying and manipulating information to support his agenda in the middle east. Why with hold judgement when someone has demonstrated such serious and twisted patterns of deceit, and the result of those lies is hundreds of thousands dead and injured.

I told you so!

cal @ 198

Also, Perle made Pat Buchanan sound reasonable and informed.

Strange how the hard-core neocons re-align the playing field and give us allies in strange places.

I know, I aways get nervous when Pat Buchanan starts to sound reasonable. I always stop and start taking an inventory of my thought process…..just to make sure.

I have been listening and reading Buchanan for 6 years now. He was against the invasion long before it started, and is not afraid to call neo-cons out on their agenda, no matter how often they attack him.

Our country has swung so far to the right (wrong) Pat Buchanan looks like he is in the middle.

My response was that Perle has demonstrated a serious pattern of lying and fabricating to support his agenda in the middle east.

I am tired of the media giving time to liars like Perle. Enough, put him in jail not on PBS. He is up to his neck in Iraqi blood and could care less. Perle is a psychopath

What BETTER way to expose the insanity of Perle, NEOCON MeriKa and their foils than to let him rant on untruthfully for an hour on major TV?

Do any of us who know people who WATCH PBS think for a MOMENT they will buy into his ’schpeal’? On the other hand, any PBS viewer who didn’t know much about politics of the NeoCon’s, NOW knows WHAT THEY PREACH!

Perhaps I’m just looking for lemonade amongst the lemons, but . . . .

All in all, it was a piece of total propaganda and never should have been allowed on PBS.

Agreed: Perle lied early and often.

I don’t know what gets defined as propaganda anymore? Personally, I don’t think that even skillful editing of known LIES really qualifies anymore. It’s a total dumbing down of propaganda and makes good propagandists cry.

Your description ‘total propaganda’ sort of got me wondering about the relative differences. I don’t think propaganda necessarily has to be lies, but ‘total propaganda’ could suffice as a synonym for such.

It’s bothersome to me that Perle gets to do on the public airwaves something I see akin to falsely yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.

In this case it’s even worse since he was yelling those lies at the time (while trying to strike the matches), and even now that he’s been shown to be incompetent (at best), he gets an hour from PBS to air his video which attempts to do for the Arabs what Mein Kampf did for the Jews?

Enjoy.

Last night I read about Natural Balance pet food company having to recall some products because of contaminated ‘rice gluten’.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/17/18112/7199

They had added rice gluten to these products about 6 months ago, but didn’t change the label to include the rice gluten because they have six months to do that.

Best bet for the consumer: don’t buy the Natural Balance pet food, it may contain the toxic gluten even though not so labelled.

That’s why I no longer watch PBS CNN NPR: the pockets of toxicity such as you target occur unpredictably on these channels, so rather than risk exposure to them, I don’t give them a chance to ‘get’ me with the toxic lies, omissions, and distortions that would affect the validity of my perceptions.

I can afford to do that now because of folks like you in the blog world, and Amy Goodman and Air America radio.

(Off topic, but relating to pet food, one of the comments in the above link suggested that the gluten probably came from GMO rice and wheat, heavily laced with a pesticide, and maybe that’s the problem. Made me wonder if pesticide manufacturers are researching making humans ’round-up ready’.)