Are you a liberal, anti-semitic conspiracy theorist?

How dumb can we get? That seems to be the experiment we’re running here in America now. Precision of thought and discourse is replaced by labels that confound analysis but rather simply bring forth a Pavlovian response.

As an example, what does the word “liberal” mean anymore? In the wake of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on demonizing this term, you’d never know that it’s original meaning was related to a defense of personal and even commercial freedoms as against a monarch’s dictatorial rule. Now all some haughty talk show personality has to do is hammer the “liberal” bell and the group mind snickers.

An even worse example is the term “anti-semite”. Literally, of course, it means being against a language group. It now pretty much means anyone who criticizes a Jew for anything. For example, try pointing out as Jimmy Carter recently did that the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank is akin to South African apartheid. The usual voices will hammer the “anti-semite” bell, and instantly Carter becomes an advocate of race hatred along the lines of Adolph Hitler. An anomaly with this term is that there is no analog for similar prejudice against any other race. For example, if the Pope declared that in time of war, it was okay and even a blessing to exterminate Israeli children, he’d probably get hit with a few “anti-semite” labels. But then, what can we call the following, reported awhile back during the most recent Israeli war on Lebanon?

“The Talmudic council of Rabbis and Torah sages known as "Yesha", which represents Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, has ruled that it is permissible, even desirable, to target and exterminate non-Jewish civilians during war time.”

Finally, to suggest that the official story of the events of September 11, 2001 contains myriad inconsistencies and outright impossibilities, is to immediately hear someone ringing the “conspiracy theorist” bell. Never mind that the official story is also a theory, never proven or even presented in a court of law, of a conspiracy of Al Qaeda agents. The conditioned response is to imagine a deranged paranoid schizophrenic fixated on imaginary enemies.

We are being deliberately dumbed-down, by a very well-funded and all-pervasive effort to turn us, as Scott Ritter says, from citizens actively and intelligently participating in a democracy, to consumers who buy a political worldview like we buy cigarette brands, based on the image presented in the advertising.

Ripe for the harvest.