How many times do I have to say, "I've said it before and I'll say it again..."?
Well, I've said it before and I'll say it again: the American people are brainwashed, and this is mostly because of the behavioral/social engineers in education, government bureaucracies and their spokespeople in the media have inculcated in the masses "cognitive dissonance"--the American people will disregard the truth in favor of listening and giving credence to what they want to hear, reinforced by pseudopatriotic images (thank you, 9-11!). See the previous article for definitions of Cognitive Dissonance as defined by the American Psychological Association and DSM-IV, and how September 11 has exacerbated the situation.
Amazingly--really, amazingly! because I'm simply amazed at the fact that such a compliant fawning media is now honing in on this issue (most likely for its sensationalist value it knows the American masses crave combined with the deep-seated muckraker-ism of the media's left-leaning minions)--newsprint and even some on TV are, to one degree or another, letting people know that Bush lied his way into Iraq. The constant drumming of the line, "where are the WMDs?" and the body count, which is averaging about 2 a day in what they now call a "guerilla war", might now be giving Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld more fits than the actual body count and the actual fiction of WMDs. In other words, the fact that the media is reporting they lied disturbs them much more than the fact that they lied. When they finally apologize for lying it will actually be for getting caught!
But to about half the people (which is better than that mythical "70%"), < a href="http://www.suite101.com/external_link.cfm?elink=http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/delaubenfels/delaubenfels5.html" target="_blank" >the truth doesn't matter. That's because they have invested so much energy (especially emotional energy) into "my country right or wrong" or "my president right or wrong" that to accept the truth is to turn their lives to mush. One could say these people are victims of the ultimate consequence of cognitive dissonance, "Post-traumatic stress disorder" (again, see last month's article). They can't handle not believing Bush, and they can't handle the difference between the freedoms the Founding Fathers wanted us to have and the "freedoms" the growing police state allows us to have (such as the "freedom" to intimidate, beat-up, verbally taunt, physically abuse people who oppose US Imperialism, people who were against the war in Iraq, or people who are Arabs).
I--and all of us who are not willfully ignorant--will just have to accept that roughly half the population will never seek the truth and will always be misled.
