We Would "Rather" Be Led

No Disputing It: Blogs Are Major Players - Los Angeles Times:

I missed the 10 year anniversary of Rathergate -- so did PowerLine, but they made up for it a bit today.

The story in a nutshell -- Sept of '04, Dan Rather came up with some "documents" that he asserted "proved" that W Bush had received "special treatment" in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG) and put on on hour long CBS 60 Minutes show to disparage W less than 2 months prior to an election. A number of "Bloggers" (a pretty new thing at the time) including PowerLine, discovered quite quickly that the supposed documents contained proportional fonts that existed in Microsoft Word in ''04, but not in typewriters in '72-'73. The story was discredited, W was re-elected and Dan Rather resigned -- truth won out for a change.

It took declassification of Soviet documents to finally prove that Alger Hiss was in fact a spy, which he was prosecuted as by the "House Un-American Activities Committee" (HUAC)  which included Richard Nixon and  Joe McCarthy -- both favorite villains of the left. One of the reasons for their "villainy" is that they supposedly smeared a non-communist, Alger Hiss -- oh, never mind. Most people are unaware that this once great controversy has been settled in favor of "the nuts on the right".

I'm farther into "The Last Lion" (Churchill biography) now and am amazed by the ability of the British Government to outright suppress information in the BBC. Churchill effectively ran a network of "spies" in the government that thought it important that SOMEONE who didn't share the officially sanctioned doctrine of "appeasement" was aware just what was happening in Nazi Germany, including the killing of Jews. Churchill was aware of this and wrote on it, but the information was largely suppressed -- Hitler could have been EASILY stopped at the point he invaded the Rhineland, but he was not. Even todays Socialists mostly agree that stopping those National Socialists in 1936 which would have removed Hitler from power would have been a really good thing -- but the truth was not getting out.

A few thoughts come to mind.

Human bias and media bias are constants -- in '36, the world-wide bias was totally in favor of "appeasement" and any other view was suppressed and rejected. Appeasement was GOING to work!

From '48 - '99, Communism was "another reasonable form of government", and the USSR was just as "good" ( successful, fair, reasonable, etc) as the USA -- guys like Nixon, McCarthy, Goldwater, Reagan, etc that thought otherwise were "dangerous" ... like Churchill was in the '30s.

Up to Rathergate, the US news media was "pretty much unbiased and could be trusted" -- Talk Radio had been around since the late '80s, and Fox had launched in the late '90s, but they were pretty much "fringe" as certainly was "The Blogsphere"  -- Rathergate was a breakthrough for a new ability to ferret out truth.

BUT ...  MOST of the population really does not want truth. They want a simple story line that makes them feel good about their present and future. Thus, nobody outside of really Hitler and his inner circle wanted war in the late '30s ... WWI had been a huge bloody disaster and people DESPERATELY wanted to hear that war could be avoided -- COMPLETELY, so no challenges to Hitler when he easily could have been stopped were to be undertaken.

Similarly, there was no reason that the USSR could not have been stopped in the '40s, '50s, '60s -- or whenever.  The strategy that Reagan followed was clearly delineated by Goldwater in the early '60s ... it could have been executed before that.

For at least this instant in time -- before it is more regulated and suppressed, the Internet gives us a great option to look at all sides and search for truth. However, the more options available also give us a greater chance of ONLY looking at sources that agree with what we want to believe.

TP will continue to try to direct the masses in the direction that they desire, and unfortunately, most want to be directed to where they "don't have to think / potentially worry"  -- pay no attention to debt / deficits / unfunded liabilities! ISIS is not Islamic, a State, or a legitimate threat -- think "JV"! IRS being used to target conservatives? Nah ... Nothing to trouble the Sheeples heads here!

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