Allow me to ask, what's a myth?

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[This is] a lesson in what historians call “exceptionalism”, the notion that the United States has the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his assassination, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”, was unspeakable. As the great people’s historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop’s much-quoted description of the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill”, a place of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians was a “triumphant joy”. The countless massacres that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by “the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained”.
http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2009/…
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Jacking an entire nation is surprisingly easy. This is how we do it: grab them by their most intimate myths.

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Cheney's Myth says: The terrorists are coming! Quick, do as you're told or you'll get us all killed. The Big Man Upstairs has authorized us to do whatever it takes to keep us safe in a world and time of war. God bless the Big Man Upstairs! Since we're doing the work of the Big Man, we can do no wrong; and anyone opposing us also opposes the Big Man. That makes them suspected evil-doers. Why should we give evil-doers a fair trial? Don't you know they hate us? Let the Big Man put them in a hidden hell forever. Gathering up and containerizing evil is the only way to keep us safe.
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American Exceptionalism says: God loves us the most, that's why we're destined to rule the earth forever, amen. God bless America! (God damn the rest of you.)

Since we're doing the work of the Big Guy Upstairs, says the myth, we can do no wrong; likewise, anyone who opposes us also opposes God, making them 'evil-doers' of whom we are duty bound to rid the world.
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I think we should call it Goering's Method, or the Goering Treatment, or maybe Cheney's Variations on Goering's Method.

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SEN. ROBERT BYRD: My hands tremble, but my heart still throbs. I read this quote: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” Hermann Goering, president of Reichstag, Nazi Parliament, 1934.
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As many readers may know, 'myth' is not synonymous with 'lie;' it's a metaphorical image of the composition and functioning of the cosmos that shapes the world in which we are enacting this wholly absurd theater of life.

National myths deliver us as a people into our Promised or Waste Land, exactly as we load them with our intentions: passengers into life boats, or kittens into burlap sacks?

Either way we're getting taken for a ride. We need to direct our own passage, but we aren't brought up as self-sovereign citizens.

Instead, we're taught to be loyal subjects, fans, of a political master of a mechanical universe; to demonstrate our loyalty by our fervor when presented with patriotic symbols.

We're conditioned to go kill or die at the whim of an imperious president with “for god, king, and country” as the subtext.

In this way, the power of myth of American exceptionalism is being used to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda.

Factual arguments, however well phrased, often fail to move electorates, but the power of myth never fails.

I frankly cannot believe that I am reading this drivel without annotation. So al-Quaeda is a military organization, it just does not happen to have a state or government to go with it. And, it's “soldiers” are not subject to the Geneva Conventions and are not regular POWs. Except for its leaders, and any bystanders, if they are assassinated, and only if it is assassination by air force.

National News in context? This does not even pass muster as stenography.