quote:
Originally posted by Dave:
There is some truth in that crack. Ollie North breaks the law, and there is a national scandal and he goes to gaol. If that happened in most countries, no one in government would bat an eyelid.

Hoorah for transparent democracies. America fucks up just like the rest of us, but its good that the dirty laundry gets aired.
Relatively transparent, maybe, but not transparent. Ollie North is a good example. He was the scapegoat of Iran Contra. He wasn't innocent, but he wasn't a lone nut, either. Either President Reagan knew about the policy and did nothing, or he wasn't really in control of his administration. It's been, what, 20 years, and we still have unanswered questions about Iran Contra. Our journalists do not ask them.

The dirtiest laundry does not get aired. Or it gets aired and ignored. Our current president, for instance, was AWOL during wartime for a period of no less than one year. This doesn't get talked about on the nightly news. This doesn't get talked about anywhere. Mention it, and it gets ignored. Watch it happen on this thread.

The issue of media ownership. A law was passed recently to deregulate corporate control of media in the U.S., basically allowing one entity to own all the media outlets -- radio, TV, and newspapers --in any given locality. And it happened behind our backs. There was no public debate. Not surprisingly, there was no coverage in the mainstream media on the run-up to the vote, which happened behind closed doors at the FCC. And now it's the law of the land.

The current administration is also trying to kill an independent investigation into September 11. Many unanswered questions there, too. The feeling one gets is that one should be satisfied with the answers provided by the official sources, contradictary and conflicting as they are.

The justification for the war in Iraq was not the unquestionably despotic rule of Saddam but specifically his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, an arsenal which does not exist. Either the entire corpus of intelligence gathered by U.S. sources was gravely wrong on many counts, or the evidence was misrepresented to the people. We can't get a straight answer out of the government about this one, either. Why would one even want to ask such questions, is the prevailing attitude over here. We're all so much safer now. Who cares about the minutae about who said exactly what and when? It's not important. It's too theoretical for practical-minded Americans. As long as the TV brings us our lifestyle comedies every evening, don't bother us.

Realizing of course that any bureaucracy will by neccesity muddy the waters, the current levels of transparency are not what one would desire from the country with the largest nuclear arnseal in the world.

How's your Mandarin, Dave? One day China will realize it owns everything already.