Crime & Federalism

Some idiot lights himself on fire.  Must be Al-Qaeda.  The Administration was willing to run with that theme.  Scare everyone.  It didn't work.

On Facebook, the sentiment was mixed between eye-rolling and outrage...Am I supposed to believe this?  How dare the government try to make this seem like a terrorist plot!  Most everyone is realizing that terrorism is a lie.  "Because everything I was ever told was a lie..."

For years many derided my views as "conspiracy theories."  This latest attack, though, was odd: The fact that the attack was a farce was accepted.  People now understand that even if the government doesn't put the "terrorists" on the plane, the government will attempt to terrify Americans by turning a random idiot into a member of a terrorist organization.

Not this time.

What has changed?  I think the Bailouts were, for many, a game changer.  TARP was a farce, and entered into under false pretense.  Remember when TARP was about lending?  Well, there's no lending.  Trillions of dollars went to Wall Street.   Goldman Sachs will pay taxpayer-funded, record bonuses while many Americans do not have jobs.  

After the bailouts, can any rational person dismiss controversial ideas as mere "conspiracy theories"?  The Bailouts, after all, are a conspiracy theory - that happen to be true.

But imagine a world without blogs.  People who claimed that the former CEO of Goldman Sachs transferred to trillions to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks would have been derided.  A nut job!  Yet we witnessed what would have dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

In real-time, we witnessed one of the greatest conspiracy theories in U.S. History: The Bailouts.  Blogs made this possible.  It took the mainstream media several months to start digging into the Bailouts.  Had blogs not forced their hands, Reuters et al. would have gladly kow-towed to their rich friends.

We now know who are real enemies are...Or at least we're starting to see.  The fools among us throw around labels like "Democrat" and "Republican" as if those terms have any more intellectual significance than "Yankees" and "Red Sox."  It's human nature to be part of a team.  What happens when your team turns against you, and starts stealing money from you and your children?

Democrats and Republicans serve the same interests - and those interests are not your interests.  Well, most of you.  (Hi, Goldman PR guys who check-in daily!)

Now that we know who the real enemies are...What are we going to do?  Once we've answered that question, there will be hope and change in America.

UPDATE: So there was another idiot in Detroit.  That idiot is not being spun as Al-Qaeda.  How the Nigerian fire cracker will be spun remains to be seen.