"about the Patriotic response to 9/11"

A New York Times OP-ED contributor named KURT EICHENWALD wrote an article called 

"The Deafness Before the Storm," published: September 10, 2012. The article details the remarkable lack of concern by the Bush administration about intelligence warnings prior to the 9/11 attack. It wasn't just one memo. It was an entire set of memos produced for months and flagrantly ignored by the entire Bush administration. The article ends with the question and its unfortunate answer: "Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t ever know. And that may be the most agonizing reality of all."

I make the argument in many of my posts that the time comes when one CAN'T know the answer because those who know the truth hide the answer too well. And I further argue that, when you CAN'T know the answer, you go with common sense.

Common sense, to me, dictates that Bush/Cheney/Rice at the very least WANTED something like 9/11 to happen. Common sense tells me that the American taxpayer paid more than enough money to be protected by existing agencies of the government and the evidence points towards the deliberate thwarting of that protection or ineptitude of an unbelievable level. They either wanted it to happen or they CAUSED it to happen.

The superior attitude of Americans that we are "a shining beacon on the hill," "the only hope of the free world," etc. is the number one mistake we make. It causes us to self-blind ourselves to the evils that exist in America. "We see no evil; we hear no evil; we speak no evil."

As Jennifer Peltz quotes in her 9/11 piece on Huffington:"After all, "9/11 has defined politics in America" since 2001, said Costas Panagopoulos, a Fordham University political science professor. "At the end of the day, 9/11 was a public tragedy that affected the nation as a whole."

Our nation has a cancer at its heart. WE, the People, have sat back and allowed the 1% to rule us ever since the end of WWII; the 1% IS the Military/Industrial Complex. We let them get away with the murder of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. We let them get away with the degrading of the entire planet, so no wonder a Congresswoman can be shot in the head without our leaders holding a serious debate on what the second amendment means TODAY. Like the tottering Congresswoman, we stumble through the Pledge of Allegiance and other daily routines pretending all is well.

But all is not well with America. There needs to be a national outpouring of whistleblowers and we need to listen and we need to indict. There will be a day of reckoning, but who will bring it? If it's only brought by one wo/man, s/he will be killed or demeaned. If it doesn't arise from the masses like an Arab Spring, how will it arise?

Aren't we really a nation as controlled as Communist China? Haven't we surrendered our common sense? 

"We are running out of chances..."

Here I am at the age of 22 in 1972. The location is Auke Bay, outside of Juneau, Alaska. I was not drafted and had I been I don't know what I would have done, probably gone to Canada. While still in high school I began reading about Viet Nam and by the time I was 18 I could hold my own in a debate about the uselessness of that war. I still believed that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy.
Looking back, I remember, around the age of 12 and 13, seeing the news footage of Martin Luther King, the marches, the dogs snapping at little black children, the fire hoses ...
I was confused about how to express myself politically, except to vote. I was put off by the cussing and hatred of much of the antiwar movement. I still thought a lot about Christ and believed that, if I were a true Christian, I would have to go to jail rather than Viet Nam, because, then, as now, I believe the red letters of the New Testament are literally true. Jesus said turn the other cheek; I believed he was a complete pacifist and, if one followed Him truly, one would never fight, period.
The "Praise Jesus" thing, so common today, was alien to me. Back in the 50s and 60s, at Trinity Baptist Church in Amarillo, Texas we didn't jump, shout, or even raise our hands over our heads, but we sure did sing! People like Pat Robertson and all the others who make such a show out of faith strike me as phony.
Maybe this is a silly little blog, but I'm introducing myself to the few people who read it.
I believed that James Earl Ray killed Martin and Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby. But I was quite troubled by all the killing. I was troubled by the 1968 Chicago Convention. I graduated high school in '68 and went out into a troubled country, playing my guitar for hours each day, finding day labor in every town I passed through.
I don't trust people who jump too quickly to conspiracy theories, who don't read and think a lot about issues before coming to a conclusion. I don't like Alex Jones any more than I do Rush Limbaugh.
But one thing that came to my mind on 9/11 was all the news stories I had seen in the 60s about Palestinian hijackers taking planes to Cuba. And, I think, there is NO EXCUSE for what happened on 9/11. None. Common sense would have dictated the locking of airplane cabin doors decades before - I don't want to hear any of the excuses.
Now, I believe our government was actively involved in the murder of the Kennedy brothers and Martin. There was a coup in November, 1963. We, as a nation have gone too long with our heads in the sand, allowing psychopaths to bluff us into believing that we needed to build and build our military no matter what the costs to Americans and American soldiers. Even at the end of WWII, when no one could have defeated us, we ignored the warnings of President Eisenhower about the Military/Industrial Complex. The press and the people do not even mention cutting back on needless wars and needless spending as one answer to the debt crisis!
That's why I admire Ron Paul so much, for calmly and rationally discussing that, if we left other countries alone, maybe they'd leave us alone. Well, Congressman Paul can't win in November. The next president will be either a Republican or Obama and there is only one sane choice between those two - Obama. If we elect him and give him a democratic majority in both houses there is hope that we can wake up from this deadly dream of constant war.
So don't give up. Register and vote. Don't bother trying to change the brainwashed minds of half of America. Just outvote them!
Here is a song I wrote back in my hippie days. I think now it expresses a kind of Jeffersonian dream. It's called Concrete and Stone.
http://burldunn.com

"about a return to Common Sense"

Well, here I go with an idea I’ve been mulling over for years. My argument is that there is almost nothing in our national discourse that is untainted by greed and the need to feel superior to others merely because we were born in the USA. I hold it to be self-evident that almost no American actually reads and follows the Constitution and the New Testament. What we take to be news is mostly opinion and propaganda. We, the people, have been fooled and we act like fools because of that.

At the end of WWII we were fooled, first of all, into believing that even though the US helped win WWII, the Russians were now our number one enemy, that they were out-spending us on the machinery of war, that they were brainwashing us, that they actually COULD take over the whole world. Meanwhile, The USSR was starving and in no way capable of taking over the world. And they had died in massive numbers to aid our fight against Hitler. They had been our ally for God’s sake. I bring this up, not because my blog will be about Russia, but to show an example of how we were fooled by the secret agencies that grew out of WWII. I don’t even know how many there are. Let’s see, the CIA, the NSA, they spring to mind. But do not all American military branches have their own secret agencies? Were not private companies granted the status of our military (Blackwater, aka whatever), except that they were MUCH better paid! Why was there the destruction of 9/11? Had we not paid enough taxes to support our spies, both good and bad? Shouldn’t the cockpit doors on our airliners have been reinforced, locked doors, ever since the Palestinian hijackings of the 1960s? Shouldn’t the FBI have listened to the field ops that reported middle-eastern non-citizens taking flying lessons, but didn’t care to learn how to land? Good God! And NO ONE was fired or demoted after 9/11 except the field ops?

Recently, a relative of mine died. She was in her 70s, had undergone open-heart surgery, and her husband was a Baptist minister. Guess what? An autopsy was ordered to determine cause of death! The US investigates plane crashes to the nth degree, but Bush said it would be too troubling to America to do a scientific analysis of the debris at the World Trade Center? No autopsy for the body of the only attack on America since Pearl Harbor? That makes no sense, unless there was something to hide. You see, we’ve lost our common sense. We are no longer an informed nation; we are a nation allowing the super rich to form US into what THEY want. I’m sick of it.

The same people who will believe anything a Republican says deny any truth to anything Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi say. People admire the “Christian” act of burning the Koran and other acts of phony or ignorant preachers and can’t see with their own eyes that President Obama has spent his presidency reaching out, not getting angry  (even when called a liar during his State of the Union address). In other words, he behaves in a humble Christian manner, on our national political stage. And let’s not forget something, lest you think it’s all because he’s black. The vicious attacks on President and First Lady Clinton began immediately upon his assuming the office. Let’s see, they killed someone in the White House, and… and… and… The battle goes back, way back, yet we Americans aren’t allowed to know the truth. It’s classified Top Secret. So are the lies. How can all these people believe Obama is not a US citizen unless the CIA, NSA, and all levels of spies know it? Why do they not stir up a fuss with them? It makes no common sense.

So my blogs are about common sense and finding that common sense in two important documents: the Bible and the Constitution. Actually, I’m only using some verses from the Old Testament book of Leviticus, the RED letters (Jesus’s words) in the New Testament, and a copy of the Constitution that includes the original language as well as strike-outs of that original language as changed by amendments.

So there’s the starting point. We, the People cannot any longer know what our government is really doing. We cannot believe most of what is said on the radio and TV and written in newspapers. So, let’s go back to original documents and apply common sense to them in light of today’s America. Get your Bible (red letter edition) and your Constitution and let’s go!