Graphic Source: Clipart.com

I can't help but be struck by the fact that as we get nearer to election time, things that we never dreamed of are being talked about as coming true in the future. Will these things ever happen or is it all just a bunch of baloney to make us think that we have an efficient government and the same party should be kept in? Don't get me wrong, both parties do this, but this time it seems to be much more excessive than ever before.

Some of you might think that I have an ax to grind, but this couldn't be further from the truth. I am just amazed at the things that are in the news lately. First of all there are all the oil finds. Remember how we were being told that we were going to run out of oil and look at how high the prices have gone? Here I was, looking at tv a few days before writing this article and amazing I saw a story about how we can now get oil from shale and the deposits of shale in Colorado are bigger than the entire deposits of the middle east. The story goes on to suggest, that if we convert this shale then we will have enough oil to power the U.S., at its current consumption, for 200 YEARS. Can you believe this, this would suggest that the oil crisis is over in the U.S. and maybe we can now become exporters and clear up our debts and maybe even become a rich country again. The next thing I see is a story about how we have discovered oil in the Gulf of Mexico and that the find is bigger than all the oil in Alaska. Here we are, according to these stories we are swimming in oil. I had read a story a few weeks before suggesting that the Canadian tar sands contain trillions of barrels of oil and we now know how to extract it. Yipes we now have too much oil. So why isn't gas and heating oil getting cheap again? If we look into the stories a little deeper we will see that all the companies are saying that it will be much more expensive to extract this oil from the various places. Was the price raise made to prepare us for this or is this all a rehash of what many knew already?

If we look at the information on the tar sand fields in Canada, we realize that this information has been out there for quite awhile. I even wrote about it some time back. We also knew about the oil shale years before, but it was said to be uneconomical when gas was cheaper. All of a sudden the discovery of the oil shale is announced like it is a new find. Come on guys, stop playing games, people are not stupid, why are you insulting their intelligence. As far as drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, we are there already. The difference here is that these wells will be the deepest ever drilled and hundreds of miles out. The test wells were dug years ago, so this was not exactly hot new news either. There is no doubt about this, all these events were well choreographed to boost the President's rating and help the oil companies succeed in keeping rates high for gas and oil. The theory being that we will be so glad to get it, that we will pay the price which may have reached its limit already in preparation for the new, more expensive, processes.

If we look at war news from Iraq, we have to notice that there is less and less mention of the amount of U.S. military killed and wounded. This is just the opposite of planting stories in the papers, it seems like they are not getting in. During the Vietnam war there was a constant tally in the news media showing these figures, why are they not in the papers now? They are not in because they can not do the administration any good. If people see these figures every day than they will get angry, so it must be a conscious effort by someone to keep them out. When we were talking about WMDs, phantom weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly in Iraq, a day didn't pass where you had stories of discoveries that were going to lead to the cache of these weapons, even though, ultimately, none were ever found.

What does a political party do when it is down in the polls and an election is coming up? They try and blame the other party for the biggest disaster that occurred on their watch. That is exactly what is going on now. The Clintons were always hated by the this party and a so called docu drama suggesting the Clinton Administration was responsible for 9/11 is going to air and indeed may have already aired by the time you read this. I certainly have nothing against docu dramas, but this one is being called a dramatization. Does that mean that some of the events are fictional that are being depicted? That is what some of the people from the old Clinton administration are saying. If this is true, then ABC and The Walt Disney Company should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know if the events depicted are true or not, but if there are people who should know, claiming that some of the events are not true and they aren't, then the very least that should be done is to have an announcement every 15 minutes or so stating that the show is fictional. If the events are true then the sources should be cited to help put some of this controversy to rest. Actually my gut feeling is that this type of show shouldn't be run at all because no good can come of it, only more polarization of the different parties. It is just amazing how they decide to show this so close to the election, isn't it?

The torture issue has been a hot topic in the news for awhile now. Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is where the topic got its start. People began to suspect that the CIA was torturing prisoners and that torture might be going on in the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo in Cuba. So how does a political party combat these notions and try and come across to the American public as sincere? They get the president to make a speech and admit to some little things that we already know so that when he tells us the Big Thing, we will believe him. Yesterday, President Bush made a speech and admitted to the world that the CIA has prisons. Are you surprised? If you are, you must be the only one. He then continued the speech and told us how interrogation methods, which were approved by the government, according to his words, extracted important information from prisoners that led to a chain of captures of many import terrorists. Then he dropped the bomb. He said that we do not torture prisoners and he didn't authorize any torture, but he could not tell us what was being done because the terrorists would train their men against it. Hey folks we already know that torture was used at ABu Ghraib, so we did use torture at least there. This was conveniently left out of the speech. The speech was a blatant attempt to boost the party standings.

Here you have it, an insight into what is really going on. It will go on until the end of time, no matter who is in office and what party controls the government. Some politicians will be better at it than others and the subtleties of a planted story will slip by unnoticed as we read the story and others will not be as good at planting their stories and we will notice right away that the story we are reading is more like propaganda for a political party. I guess this is what we have to look forward to in the future.