Political winds shift on prairie (Nebraska)

[RamboLiberal]

MCCOOK, NEB. -- In early February, the war in Iraq came home to this small railroad town on the Nebraska prairie where farms begin to give way to high plains.

Seven thousand miles away on a Baghdad street, a bomb exploded beside Army Sgt. Randy J. Matheny's armored vehicle, killing the 20-year-old McCook High School graduate and stunning his small hometown.

"It caused us all to reexamine what we were thinking," said Walt Sehnert, who has run a popular bakery on McCook's main street since 1957. "Those of us who were adamant about the war had to stand back and take a deep breath."

Across Nebraska, there has been a lot of reexamination lately.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nebraska16apr16,0,4062401.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[Kerrytravelers]

1. Nice to see the winds are changing.

Of course, I have to wonder about the other military people who have died? Does it really take someone in your hometown dying before you rethink your position? Perhaps I'm being unfair, but it didn't take Casey Sheehan dying before I thought about how wrong this invasion and occupation is.

[K8-EEE]

2. K&R

Hopeful, thank you.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Sometimes I wonder when war profiteering corporate news monopolies talk about "winds."

Is this their fatcat zillionaire CEO breaking wind? A fart in the newsstream that masks the stink of global corporate predator garbage that passes itself off as "mainstream" American "new" and opinion? Is this the hot air between the electrons of Bushite-corporate controlled voting machines? Is this the toxic wind blowing across pesticide-ridden corporate ethanol fields? Is this the depleted uranium blowing in the desert winds of Iraq? What winds are blowing that cause the highly manipulated headlines of corporate monopoly newspapers to rearrange readers' perceptions about war, about "free trade," about the vice president's no-bid contracts, about "public opinion"? What "wind" was blowing in 2003 that caused them all to print government war propaganda that scattered the brains of the American people to the four winds--or seemed to, in their narrative--that isn't blowing now, so that their thinking caps remain on their heads, and, lo, they now see the light--ah, war means dead sons and daughters, and unjustified war means bitter regrets, anger, political retribution?

Is it that the profit to be made from war has just about run out, leaving a bankrupt people, whose true opinion of unjust, illegal, heinous war can now be permitted to blow through the corporate newsstream without it affecting anything, or changing anything?

56% of the American people opposed this war from the beginning, before the invasion, even before Colin Powell's 100% pack of lies to the UN was fully exposed. 56%! That would be a landslide in a presidential election, and, if the truth were known, it was. What of the blazing wind of war propaganda that was blown over them, to demoralize them, to destroy their will and their wisdom, and to make them feel like a minority--the firestorm of "groupthink" and war fever that the LAT, the NYT, the WaPo, AP, the WSJ, Faux News, and ABCNBCCNNCBS inflicted upon them, to shut them up? What of the "news consortium" and their hired gun exit pollster who lied to them about who won the 2004 election?

Why, in 2003, didn't the war profiteering corporate news monopolies find the people in that Nebraska town who were part of that FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people who opposed this war, and interview them THEN? And put them on the front page, and say, 'Hey, MOST Americans don't support this war--let's slow down and think this through."

Having NOT done that--having ignored and blackholed the majority--now they interview one of the 44% of the uninformed and unthinking and unwise, and call it a "shift in the wind."