My Taxi Driver's Conspiracy Theory.........

[global1]

A week ago I took a cab back home from the airport. I engaged the cab driver (an eastern European) in a political discussion because I found that many of these foreign cab drivers have very strong opinions of our government. He told me he has been in the U.S. now for 11 years and that he has noticed changes in the U.S. since * has been in office that reminded him of the tough times back in his country. He said he can't believe that * won the 2nd term because all the people he talks to in his cab didn't vote for *. Then he went on to launch - what I thought then - a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

He said that celebes like Paris or Brittany or Lindsay where being paid by the government to be diversions. I kind of just laughed that off - until today when I'm watching and listening to this media circus surrounding Paris Hilton.

Look at the important stories that should be being reported on that are just receiving lip service on this Friday - news dump day.
Peter Pace resigning. G8 missile defense to Azerbijan re: * and Putin. Blackwater suing families of slain employees to silence them. Turks invading the Kurds. and on and on and on.

Then I just heard on MSNBC from some celebrity pundit that Paris gets paid to go to parties and be kind of out there and that others like her get paid as well.

So today I think back on my cab ride and wonder if this dude was onto something.

To go on just a bit further and to change the subject a bit - I blame Paris Hilton's parents for condoning her behavior. To me they should be held accountable - even though Paris is of age. They use their money and influence to protect their daughter when they should be cutting her off for bringing so much embarrassment to their family and the Hilton name.

Not only that - they are also contributing to this now widely accepted fact that there are two systems of justice in this country - one for the poor and one for the rich - and that the rich get preferential treatment. To that I say - the only way we could begin to get the message across to people like the Hilton's is to hurt their pocket book.

Honestly - I don't know how much they are still involved in the Hilton chain of hotels - but - if people stopped being patrons of the Hilton hotel chain and opted for other venues - then maybe they would begin to take notice that we aren't going to take this anymore.

Thank you - my rant for the day.

[zonmoy]

1. I don't think you should dismiss the views of someone that grew up

in eastern europe. a place that until about 20 years ago was a dictatorship. A person who has lived in a dictatorship would definitely have the knowledge to tell when the country they are now living in is becoming one.

[JHB]

2. They're not being paid directly...

But they all qualify for *'s tax cuts. And Brittany and Lindsay both come out of the Disney 'tween machine...

[durtee librul]

3. I posted something like this a while back

as one of my suppliers is from Eastern Europe and he is also seeing the same thing he saw when Milosevic first came to power. He is scared and has moved his family to Canada. Said living thru one dictator was enough to last he and his family forever.

So now if these people can 'see' it, why can't the average American?

I was just with another supplier who tried to tell me she felt sorry for * as he had done so much good in his first years of office. I challenged her to name me ONE...and guess what it was.....the old 'well, I'm safer now than I was before 9/11' crap. I told her if she really thought he was so f*g good, why are we now a debtor society and then asked if she had $$ in the bank - of course she did. I told her, well, you're better off than the US of A you claim to love as we are in hock up to our eyeballs and the kid you have in your belly will be paying George's fuck ups long after you are dead and buried. I also asked her if she had been to Canada lately and gotten asked any questions at the border other than passport please? (they don't even ask anything on the US side - the Canadian side - well, they DEMAND! LOL!!!)

She shut up....and damn I so wanted to engage her in further discussion! LOL!!!!

[zonmoy]

7. plenty of average americans are seeing it but

either think that nothing can be done to stop it or are just to afraid to try anything.

[Hamlette]

4. you don't need to believe the celeb is being paid, only the MSM is being paid

they are fomenting all of this.

[On the Road]

5. It Is, of Course, an Absurd Conspiracy Theory

But what is just as important is that the results are the same. It might as well be true in a sense because because it behaves that way and in practice serves that purpose.

Your cab driver was used to a command and control government which tightly controlled what information was available. We are in a more open and diverse society, and society operates more by tacit understandings and unspoken incentives. The challenge is always to explain things in light of these influences on human behavior.

[PDJane]

6. Oddly enough,

I have had this discussion both recently and in.......about 1995, I think, with a friend who lived through Nazi Germany and Russia. She had the same viewpoint, and I would in no way argue with her. (I should explain that she is Polish.) She is an acute observer, nearing the end of a long life......she has informed me that she isn't sorry that she is, because she isn't up for the fight this time.

She did say that the celebrities are likely to be paid for being a distraction; she was quite sure that the young women didn't likely know where the money was coming from. She seems to think that North Americans are quite naive.

I am also going to point out that Communist Europe didn't have the same lock on the information flow that the current administration does. Interestingly enough, one of the comments from one of the group of ex-pats from Poland was that the first thing they noticed was the photocopy machines available in the airport. "If we had those in back home, there would be a snowstorm of underground newspapers!"

[Octafish]

8. CIA Instructions to Media Assets re: Assassination of President Kennedy

Corporate McPravda continues to spread Bush's lies. For instance, the idea that Saddam kicked out UN weapons inspectors.

GOP/Media Rewrite Iraq War History

By Robert Parry
June 8, 2007

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and radio personality Jay Diamond are right to wonder why Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney got away with rewriting a key chapter of the Iraq War history without political reporters raising a peep.

At the June 5 Republican debate, co-sponsored by CNN, Romney defended George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on the grounds that Saddam Hussein refused to let United Nations weapons inspectors in to search for WMD.

If Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction,” the war might have been averted, the former Massachusetts governor said.

But the reality is that Hussein did open up his country through the fall and winter of 2002-03, giving Hans Blix and his U.N. inspection team free rein to check out suspected WMD sites. It was President Bush who forced the U.N. inspectors out in March 2003 so his invasion could proceed.

The answer to the media question of why the U.S. press corps didn’t object to Romney’s bogus account is that Washington journalists have accepted this revisionist history since Bush began lying about the facts in July 2003.

On July 14, 2003, as the U.S.-led WMD search was coming up empty and only four months after Bush pushed the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq, he began asserting that Hussein had never let the inspectors in. Bush told reporters:

“We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/060807.html

Gee. Where'd Mitt the Hairdo get the inspiration for that stuff?

Well, the Big Lie worked to cover-up for the traitors after Dallas.

CIA Instructions to Media Assets

CIA Document #1035-960, marked "PSYCH" for presumably Psychological Warfare Operations, in the division "CS", the Clandestine Services, sometimes known as the "dirty tricks" department.

RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with (?)and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)
4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:


a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. (Archivist's note: This claim is demonstrably untrue with the latest file releases. The CIA had an operational interest in Oswald less than a month before the assassination. Source: Oswald and the CIA, John Newman and newly released files from the National Archives.)

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)


5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

SOURCE

The Big Lie also works for today's crazy gamma chimp.

Those who object, he labels "conspiracy theorist" as code for "psycho."



That's one thing he does know about.