*Eleditor’s note: Elephant is a diverse community of nine million readers and hundreds of writers (you can write too!). We are reader-created. Many blogs here are experience, opinion, and not fact or The One Right Point of View. We welcome all points of view, especially when offered with more sources and less invective, more frankness and less PR. Dislike this Op-Ed or opinion? Share your own take here.

In the same way we need to dig for the truth of our own self through self-inquiry and other means, we need to dig for the truth behind political speeches and media headlines through investigative journalism.

It is my view that most, nearly but not quite all, politicians and bureaucrats do not tell the truth.

I do not believe anything they say. I see them as Penn & Teller wannabees, or better-dressed versions of the street-wise David Blaine, wonderful magicians whose sleight of hand prowess and psychological misdirection fool us not once, not twice—but every single time!

I watched President Obama give his speech about going to war with ISIL (or ISIS or Islamic State) in order to degrade and destroy them.

Honestly, a small part of my primitive brain celebrated, thinking:

Let’s kill every one of those motherf*ckers. I abhor what they are doing. Hell, I may be 64 years old, but sign me up! I will f*cking put a bayonet in their eyes and cut their heads off!

But then I came to and realized I was listening to a politician, a magician. And I remembered the cost of the wildly successful magic show of Bush/Cheney, whose WMD ploy and outright lying led to this:

“The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

“The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

“When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war’s death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.”

Sadly for Bush/Cheney, their magic was not as foolproof as they would have thought. A precious few of us saw through it right away; most were fooled. Now, everyone can see how they did it and how we were fooled by watching Rachel Maddow’s documentary, Why We Did It.

Or you can read any number of dozens of books.

The point is that we’re still paying the price for our foolishness.

Back to Obama’s speech. I immediately began looking for Obama’s trickery and deception. How in the world is he going to pull this off?

I began digging. Sure enough, eerily similar to Bush/Cheney, his specious argument for war turns out to be just that: specious. My definition of that word is deliberate disinformation and deception dressed as unarguable truth. And he is launching yet another stage in a staggering tragedy by himself.

No one can stop him. He doesn’t need Congressional approval, so he says. He doesn’t need your approval, or mine. One man decides to start smoking while sitting atop the largest ammo depot in history.

Is this okay with you?

We are going deeper into the rabbit hole of the Bush/Cheney tragi-magic. Let me share with you some of my research, some of my inquiry into truth. Please have a look. Then you decide.

And then decide what you want to do about it, if anything.

• President Obama’s Speech
• 5 Questions About the War Against ISIS That No One Should Be Embarrassed to Ask
• News Organizations Finally Realize Obama’s War Plan Is A Hot Mess
• Obama’s legally dubious Isis campaign is just a way to continue perpetual war
• Four Myths about Obama’s War ISIS
• Insanity
• What Would Dr. King Do?
• Who Pays for the Pro-War Pundits?

 

Love elephant and want to go steady?

Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters!

Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: elephant archives / public domain