I agree with droog, we need a final solution. My co-religionists and I have been working on an excellent plan for a New World Order, one world government under the UN. We began with taking control of the world media, producing material like Fox News and Everyone Loves Raymond and Funniest Home Videos, material so retarded and absurd that the watchers become stupid and placid in watching, and more willing to accept things like oil dependence and the idea that a secular dictator would support a terrorist group dedicated to his downfall, thus leading to a war which would bankrupt the US and leave it ripe for conquest.

Unfortunately word of our plans leaked, and there's already a training manual preparing Americans to fight the UN occupation. But I am confident of our ultimate success.

Quote from: jgants;220771Except, of course, that the US was paying for it via the BNL scandal, as confirmed by the Senate Banking Committee during their investigation and as reported by nearly every major media outlet.

The problem is that when I looked for information and sources for this scandal, what I find is not so much congressional hearings but a one-man-show run by Democratic Representative Henry Gonzalez, then chair of the House Banking Committee, going after George H. W. Bush and making the usual "Watergate" noises during an election year against a sitting President.  That the rest of the then-Democrat controlled House didn't seem to be going along for the ride and that the Clinton administration drops it suggests more a single partisan representative tilting at windmills rather than a major expose.  BNL was ultimately an Italian bank that was raided and shut down by agents of the US government in 1989.  Might the CIA have known something fishy was going on before that?  Possibly.  But that doesn't necessarily lead to the conclusion that it was an Iran-Contra style set-up, either.  If you've got some solid evidence that's not simply reporting about the same partisan source (Gonzalez) I'd be happy to look at it.

Quote from: jgants;220771As for the UK, I don't know quite as much about that, except that members of Parlaiment openly called Thatcher a liar for denying knowledge.

Politicians call other politicians liars all the time.  I don't find that particularly compelling.  What was their evidence?

Quote from: jgants;220771I also find it extremely hard to believe that no one noticed a prominent arms manufacturer was ordering pipes built to strange specifications that were being shipped to a country in the middle of the war.

I don't, since they were being procured through a set of front companies designed for that purpose and were being called oil pipeline parts which, given their appearance, was not entirely absurd.

Quote from: jgants;220771And that's not even getting into the multiple sources who claim Bull was in contact with MI-5 during the whole thing.

What sources?  I've seen documentaries from the late 1980s, sadly still sometimes being shown, that make all sorts of claims about US involvement  KAL-007 shootdown that have since been proven false because the Soviet Union had recovered the black boxes.

Quote from: jgants;220771So your theory is that nearly every major media outlet is completely biased and unreliable?  Except, of course, for good ol' Fox News. Tell me, did they all come up with the same story coincidentally, or was there a big liberal media meeting at the Illuminati headquarters to discuss it first?

Do you understand how the mainstream news media works and, more importantly, worked during the 1980s and 1990s?  You do understand wire services, syndicated columnists, and the influence that the New York Times and Washington Post had (and still have, in some cases) over other mainstream media sources, right?  You are familiar, for example, with the widely reported story that more women are victims of domestic violence on Superbowl Sunday than any other day of the year, right? So tell me, how did a "fact" that was entirely made up and based on no research come to be widely reported as the truth and is, to this day, believed by many?  And that's not the only case, simply one of the most overt that they got caught on.  When everyone has a similar political bias, you don't need a meeting to get everyone to act the same way, any more than you need an Illuminati headquarters meeting to make everyone stop at a red light and go at a green light.  And let's not forget the role that Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the liberal media "watchdog" group played in the Superbowl domestic violence charade.  

Quote from: jgants;220771Except, of course, by all the reports from sources who did see them.  But then, I suppose you think Ollie North managed the Iran-Contra thing all by himself, too.

And from what I was able to glean looking from facts, it was more often a "source" than "sources" and they were never really corroborated.  As for Ollie North, yes I believe he was able to manage the Iran-Contra thing without top-to-bottom knowledge of what was going on.  

Quote from: jgants;220771Again, except for all the evidence and sources saying it was.

What evidence and sources?  What I found was largely (A) one congressman with an axe to grind (with an investigation that went nowhere, even when the administration changed hands and Democrats gained full control over the Congress and Presidency) and (B) some sources who claim things but offer no corroboration .  Might it be true?  Possibly.  Of course I was also able to find sources claiming that the CIA was protecting not Bush 41 but the Italian government and their involvement since BNL was, after all, an Italian bank.

Quote from: jgants;220771Well, we usually do prosecute somebody in the end.  Whether its because some outside agency like customs or the UN gets involved, or just to satisfy the public.  Gerald Bull took the hit for Operation Savannah, Ollie North took the hit for Iran-Contra, etc.  Essentially, we do something bad, eventually get caught, and somebody gets made a scapegoat.

Yet you believe that they never ever actually catch the real person involved?  Doesn't Occam's Razor suggest that sometimes the person who gets punished is responsible and that there just isn't any puppet-master pulling the strings?

Quote from: jgants;220771As I thought Carter was one of our worst presidents, you'll get no argument with me that he messed a lot of things up.  I have no doubt he had a lot of bad plans in the works (he certainly stumbled around with regards to El Salvador and the whole death squad thing).  I thought Clinton fucked up with Haiti and Somalia, and Kennedy was a mess dealing with Cuba, too.  

Conversely, I agreed with Reagan selling the weapons to Iran to get the hostages back (though I'm not going to pretend he wasn't involved, as some people like to do) and liked how he handled Grenada, Libya, and the Soviet Union, and didn't particulary have any issues with regards to the way he dealt with Haiti, El Salvador, Nicarauga, or most other foreign entanglements.

Well, Reagan himself ultimately admitted that he was trading arms for hostages and given his personality, I think he might have admitted to Iran-Contra were he really involved in that decision, too.  I don't doubt that there are cases where the CIA or, more accurately, people in the CIA who knew certain things were going on just as there were apparently people in intelligence agencies that were aware of bits and pieces of 9/11 before it happened but that doesn't mean that any central organizing person or group of people knows about it.  Having worked even for a state government, the idea that any figure or group of figures in the government knows everything that's going on to the degree that people seem to imagine or even could know what's going on to that degree if they wanted to seems absurd to me.

Quote from: jgants;220771Gleichman was the one making claims that only "liberals" were accomodating to evil empires.  My argument was just that conservatives have also gotten in bed with some nasty people when it suited them, and are hardly be the "stand-up guys" they appear to be in the Gleichmanverse.

Well, a large degree depends on whether you actually believe that the United States was backing the lesser of two evils or doing so for a noble cause or whether you believe it was more like a football game where both sides were pretty much the same and the motivation was self-interest.

QUOTE=jgants;220771]I'd also argue about liberals who did stand up against evil empires, but Gleichman already discounted all those presidents as being conservative.  Apparently Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the only two liberal presidents in the history of the US (at least, in Gleichmanspeak).[/QUOTE]

While I don't really agree with FDR and the later LBJ as being characterized as conservatives, I do think that JFK would have a hard time feeling at home in the modern Democratic Party and it's not difficult to see how that party changed in response to the 1968 convention and 1972 nomination of McGovern.  

Quote from: jgants;220771I'll just point out that I, for one, am not disputing where the actual materials came from.  My argument is that US supplied the money to Iraq to get those materials, and turned a blind eye while they did it.

I think the issue is a bit more complicated than that.  Clearly the US supplied the money that BNL was laundering but BNL was misusing it, which is why they got raided and the operation was shut down.  So the question is whether people in the US government knew that it was being funneled that way and let it happen on purpose.  And if you want to believe that the evidence suggests that there was a Watergate-scale coverup and that Bush I and others were involved, which is what Gonzalez seems to have been claiming, then you have to answer why the Clinton Administration let it drop, so then they have to be included in the conspiracy, and so on.  So what you quickly wind up with is a huge conspiracy throughout the government involving hundreds, if not thousands, of people as well as the press (who also let the issue drop) to keep silent for.  Doesn't Occam's Razor favor incompetence or ignorance?

Since the thread has derailed from matters of policy cultural and political to matters of elites pulling the strings and shadow ops to designed to bring massive harm to those who ordered them...

I thought we'd kick this off in the right way. Thus I present-

http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Guide/good_guide_to_the_shadowy_organizations_that_rule_the_world

I think it obvious for example the Freemasons are pure evil. RPGPundit = Freemason, and besides allowing evil wicked people such as myself to post in what would otherwise be a stronghold of correct thinking people, I'm betting that he eats babies too. His rants against Bush are just a cover to give him deniability.

Oh wait, that article is actually somewhat reasonable. Sorry, never mind.

Quote from: John Morrow;220789While I don't really agree with FDR and the later LBJ as being characterized as conservatives, I do think that JFK would have a hard time feeling at home in the modern Democratic Party and it's not difficult to see how that party changed in response to the 1968 convention and 1972 nomination of McGovern.

I'd agree about JFK, given that we agree about FDR.  And of course the political parties have changed.  Among other things, the Democratic party went from being quite racist at the start of the century to supporting desegregation, which lost them the South.  The McGovern Commission to reform the party process also shook things up, from what I understand, though we've still got these stupid super-delegates.

Quote from: jhkim;220927The McGovern Commission to reform the party process also shook things up, from what I understand, though we've still got these stupid super-delegates.

Bob Beckel claims that teh super-delegates were put into place to stop Teddy Kennedy from getting the nomination, something that he came very close to doing during the Carter period.  They didn't want a repeat of the 72 Nixon landslide.