RIP Coco: Cognitive Dissonance Rules!! Durbin, Tenant, and Kieth Olbermann on Rudy...

Yeah, what she said!! Jill the Brilliant has been watching Moyers on the selling of the war and how the press has been complicit in the execution of what is turning out to be a crapload of worse, worser, worst lies than we could ever have imagined. Needless to say, She is as disgusted as I am about this whole thing.

What is it that Janeane Garafolo goes on about all the time?...oh yeah, cognitive dissonance! Thats when conflicting thoughts or beliefs cause mental tension that is so intense that one has to adjust what might just be the truth in order to release tension between opposing sides. With the release of tension also comes the adjustment of what the mind knows is truth; if one set of beliefs starts to become untrue, the mind then goes into overdrive trying to rejustify by actually altering the original belief or explaining it away in some convenient fashion that isn't really all that far from the original belief. So, when asked to lie about something, without even a profit motive, if a subject can be persuaded for whatever reason to begin the lie, the internal cognitive dissonance caused by the truth vs. fiction causes the lie to become internalized and embraced as some sort of truth. What other explanation is there in the face of our entire press corps laying down? This is probably the answer to my years old question of how do they sleep at night?... Its all been justified somehow and the evident truth to them, while not actually the real and scientific truth, seems just close enough...

The other troubling thing, which I knew already, but its worth repeating again and again, is that people who watch Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert have a much better knowledge and understanding of what is going in in this country than those who watch Faux news....Maybe its easier to embrace the comedy of the truth than the tragic lies that might make us complicit in the silence that has made the deaths of thousands of people and the physical destruction of a country possible...?
The frightened woman in the gym (up from her winter home in Florida, no less,) was just telling me how her husband tells her, and she believes it, that she must ONLY watch Fox because all the rest are full of propaganda. But why the fear of hearing what everyone else is saying? Why would you want to protect yourself, if you know its all lies? Because the dawning truth is just too hard for most people to deal with, and so they have to embrace the lie harder and harder, closing their eyes tight and humming loudly so as not to have to face the fucking truth of this thing.
Look, I love America, and I am a patriot just the same as any of these people, but patriotism isn't about blindness. Its about knowing what we've done and what has been done in our names, because we are a democratic society and responsible for what these guys do out there in the world! Its is our responsibility to know what is happening, good or bad...and to try to fix what has gone wrong. The longer we put this off, the worse it gets...and its bad.

Then, in the category of "And you're just saying this now??" comes leaked parts of George Tenant's book, in which he finally speaks up about all the lies...now...rather than when it would have made a difference...Apparently, it was OK to be "At the center of the storm" and complicit in all of this crap when it was happening, but as soon as he realized that he was gonna be the one who gets thrown under the bus, and with a multimillion dollar book deal, he found his voice.

And the Senate Intelligence Committee's Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)agonized this week on the senate floor about how the committee KNEW that the American people were being lied to all along but that they were sworn to secrecy. Not one of them would take a chance to break protocol and go public or at least leak something?...As Keith Olbermann said in response to this, not one of those "patriots" could see that this was going to be a disaster of epic proportions and considered that fact more important than their careers or their "oath?" I'm sorry but I don't buy this "oath" nonsense, because obviously, as has been shown over and over by their actions, almost every single one of those guys, on both sides put together, have about maybe 1/10th of the amount of ethical and moral sense as any normal person on the street. So, does that mean they they have now been suddenly released from their oath? Or are they just able to judge the line when the public knows enough that the oath doesn't make a difference anymore? I'm disgusted.

I love the snowball rolling down the hill behind Cheney and Bush as much as anyone, but I cant imagine that these people were so cowardly as to stay in the pack until it was perfectly safe for them to step forward.

And then in the arena of bald faced liars in the first degree we have Rudy Guilliani, liar extraoridinaire and just plan old nasty guy. Now there is a guy that we really cant have for president...he is on who would literally get us all killed! Here is Kieth's brilliant and angry comment on Guilliani...Its long but well worth it.