My latest article in Freedom Daily is “Ellsberg’s Lesson for Our Time.” I should have read Daniel Ellsberg’s excellent memoirs – SECRETS: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers – long ago. But better late than never.
Here is the lead of the article:
Daniel Ellsberg is the kind of American who should receive a Medal of Freedom. Except that the Medals of Freedom are distributed by presidents who routinely give them to “useful idiots” and apologists for their wars and power grabs. It should be renamed the Medal for Enabling or Applauding Official Crimes in the Name of Freedom.
Ellsberg knowingly risked spending a life in prison to bring the truth about the Vietnam War to Americans. He had hoped truth would set Americans free from the spell of official lies. But the experience in Iraq indicates that Americans have learned little if anything from the Vietnam-era deceits.
(The Future of Freedom Foundation puts the full text of Freedom Daily articles online a few months after the print/email version appears).
The public, such as it is, appears to favor the fantasy and faux truth dispensed daily by our media and is wary of letting skepticism in to rain on their increasingly tenuous position. The NY Times published an article in yesterday’s Sunday Magazine on the low approval rating of the TSA. What was most interesting in the article was the graph depicting 10 or so departments of the government and the corresponding public’s satisfaction rating. TSA and FEMA , of course in negative , sub 50% territory but the bottom pariah was the Congress. According to those polled, Congress is disliked more than the IRS, Homeland Security , TSA and even FEMA. Congress should be proud of this well-earned badge of dysfunction because they have done a superb job of playing “Stella” to the Executive’s “Stanley” .
Though it has yet to dawn on them, the more passes they give this cockeyed President…..in the pursuit of harmony….the more they are reviled. In this atmosphere, it is in the Executive’s interest to make blunder after blunder because with each blunder of the Executive, the Congress is closer to complete irrelevancy, the overall goal of the current Executive.
One is left wondering exactly what precipitated this rapid descent into the world of the Banana Republic.
I suspect the bottom began to fell out after people starting drinking Zima as a substitute for real beer.
Actually, most of what was sold after Prohibition was a bad substitute for real beer.