The Hoax

Aug. 31, 2005

As soon as the August 18 issue of the Express hit the streets we began getting phone calls and emails noting that a news item called “Mars Moment” was an Internet hoax.
I appreciated those calls and that level of concern. At the same time, I was bummed that Mars wouldn’t be filling my new spotter scope quite as fully as I had hoped for on August 27. I had hoped to see the famous canals of Mars, and -- who knows? -- maybe even a Martian gondolier floating past my field of vision.
For the record, that item was based on two sources: a friend passed along a very convincing email from what seemed to be a scientific organization and I conducted a Google search which turned up the same information on the Internet. It wouldn’t have occurred to me in 60,000 years that anyone would dream up a hoax about something as mundane as the orbit of Mars.
But suppose that someone in our office had glanced at that item before it went to print. Suppose someone had said, “You know, I heard this might be a hoax.” That tiny bit of niggling would have planted enough doubt to have vaporized the hoax and the resulting correction we ran...
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It got me thinking about the much larger hoax that has been perpetrated on our country by President Bush and his administration -- the hoax behind the war in Iraq.
Americans have a love/hate relationship with hoaxes. As our little drama at the Express shows, we love to expose them -- we love to reveal the humbug Wizard working the controls behind the Great and Powerful Oz.
So when a hoax claims the lives of 1,900 American soldiers, wounds more than 13,000 others, results in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the loss of $60 billion per year, shouldn’t there be a bit more of an outcry?
By now, most Americans know all about this hoax. The question is whether we even care.
“For the first time, a majority of Americans, 51%, say the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- the reason Bush emphasized in making the case for invading,” stated USA Today in a July 27 poll. Those poll numbers have risen even further since then.
In plain terms, “deliberately misled” means “lied.”
And what does “lied“ mean? Families who lost sons and daughters in Iraq -- they were lied to. Army reservists whose lives have been tossed upside down -- lied to. Soldiers coming back without arms or legs, strung out on drugs and depression -- lied to.
In the fall of 2002 most Americans were completely befuddled as to the reasons why President Bush was urging a war with Iraq. But Bush, Colin Powell & Co. kept up a steady drumbeat of claims stating that there were unquestionably weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.
Like our bit with the Mars Hoax, the national press -- including The New York Times and Washington Post (no lovers of Bush) -- went along with the WMD spiel. Few in the press imagined that the White House would lie about a matter of this gravity.
The smoking gun behind the administration’s claim was that Iraq had tried to purchase 500 metric tons of “yellowcake” uranium from the African country of Niger in order to make nuclear weapons. This was announced as proof that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program.
But the yellowcake claim was quickly labeled as being untrue in a New York Times op-ed column by ambassador Joseph Wilson -- the administration’s own investigator -- who traveled to Niger in 2002 on behalf of the White House. He reported that the yellowcake story was bogus, yet it was fed to us as the truth.
The rest is history; apparently Karl Rove and other officials in the White House sought revenge on Wilson by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.
And the guys who presented us with false information justifying the war were either promoted or re-elected.
President Bush? He‘s off on a five-week vacation, telling us that more troops should die to honor those who‘ve already been killed.
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So, if someone at your workplace told you that a very dangerous and questionable enterprise was based on a hoax, would you plunge blindly on with it as George Bush did?
Would your family push on with something that was based on even a mildly stupid hoax if it meant a son or daughter might get killed?
Well, the American Family did just that.
Today, evidence continues to flow in demonstrating that the great hoax behind the War in Iraq was a conspiracy to fool the American people into stepping on the diplomatic equivalent of a roadside bomb.
From the revelations of warmongering that former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill heard at the White House on his first day on the job to the Downing Street Memo in which Britain agreed to help Bush in bamboozling the American people, we now know that the reasons behind the war were a hoax.
It’s funny how it took one mom grieving over her lost son to wake up the American people to the lies behind this war. We’ll undoubtably be hearing more: on September 24, hundreds of thousands of war protesters will hold an Impeachment March in Washington, D.C.
Someday, perhaps, there will be a statue of George Bush in downtown Baghdad, celebrating his role as the liberator of democratic Iraq. At that point, he can sit up in his nursing home bed and say, “I told you so.”
Either that or we’ll remember him as a bungler who got our country into a world of trouble from which we never recovered -- all based on a hoax which we all too willingly swallowed.

It‘s time to charge admission to the Cherry Festival

Now that Tom Kern is stepping down as director of the National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, perhaps his successor should consider an idea Tom suggested some time ago: A gated venue and an admission fee.
On the whole, Traverse City residents love the Cherry Festival, but are also weary of the crowds and chaos. And we‘re weary of the high taxes for those who live in town -- two separate things, but still...
Milwaukee, Nashville and many other cities have gated venues and admission fees for their festivals and so should Traverse City. An admission fee to a half-mile area fenced off along the bay would tone down the crowds and provide money for law enforcement and better musical acts among other benefits. Other cities charge for their festivals which nonetheless carry on like gangbusters. We‘re giving away our sanity when we should be charging for it.