Speculation as “News,” Assumptions as “Facts”

Whenever some major “breaking news” event is being covered live by the media, one can witness the manner in which the political establishment manipulates the crisis to both create and reinforce the party-line explanation in order to provide Boobus with “his” opinions so as to sound “informed” when speaking with others. This morning’s series of shootings in Ottawa, Canada provide an example. One erstwhile CIA “analyst” – now “security expert” – was interviewed on one news channel, and kept suggesting that this could be a plot carried out by ISIS. The words “assume” and “possibility” kept being used in the interview to overcome the absence of credible evidence, although at one point the self-styled “expert” informed us that the gunman was dressed in black, a color of attire favored by terrorists. The news channel then focused its cameras on the outdoors, where numerous SWAT-team members were pointing their rifles toward different spots in the area. These SWAT-team gunmen were also dressed in black, a fact that caused me to wonder if the expert would extend his analysis to suggest that the shootings were engineered by Canadian police interests.

The American public has long been conditioned in the “lone-nut-with-a-gun” explanation for such acts of violence, and would find it difficult to accept the possibility – so well understood by Europeans – of the agent provocateur as the causal source. The U.S. government hasn’t come forth with its edition of the script, but we may soon be told that this gunman had a Liberian passport and, therefore, may have been part of a terrorist plot to spread the Ebola virus into North America. I share with the late George Carlin the sentiment that “I do not believe anything the government tells me,” an admonition that ought to be at the forefront of our thought processes.

I do not subscribe to any conspiracy explanations that are not supported by evidence. Should a non-establishment (or even anti-establishment) explanation be offered for today’s violence in Ottawa, my skepticism might abate with how officialdom would respond to such an allegation. Would it be rejected out-of-hand? I long ago found it wise to never accept something as true until it had been officially denied.

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12:58 pm on October 22, 2014