I thought I’d begin
this rant by sharing some of my
thoughts on the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth. I think
we can
all agree that, unlike some of the other subjects I have weighed in on
in the
past, this is one on which people do not tend to have strongly held
points-of-view, so there is little chance that I will offend and
alienate
readers right off the bat.
So
let’s jump right into it then
with observation #1: When the likely outcome of an unwed pregnancy is
death by
stoning, people can be really creative liars.
Nothing
in the least bit
controversial about that … right? Let’s move on then to observation #2:
It is
fully understandable why the lie was told, and even why many people in
that era
might have believed it; what is more difficult to understand is why
tens of
millions of people around the world still believe it 2,000 years later.
I
doubt that I’ve lost anyone
yet, so let’s quickly move on to observation #3: Jesus was initially
described
as coming from a line of men who worked with their hands, which was
later
interpreted to mean that he was a carpenter. Given though that the
primary
building materials in the land of his birth were sand and rock, it is
far more
likely that Joseph and his sons were stone masons. Just saying …
Observation
#4: Jesus of Nazareth’s
real father
was undoubtedly a Roman citizen. Some have speculated that he was the
product
of rape by one of the notoriously ruthless Roman storm-troopers, but
his later
actions suggest to this completely impartial observer that it was more
likely a
consensual coupling and that the father was someone of considerably
more
importance than a mere soldier.
Observation
#5: Jesus was very
likely a controlled Roman asset. Just as, nearly two thousand years
later, the
obviously controlled asset known as Jesse Jackson replaced the slain
Martin
Luther King, and the equally controlled asset known as Louis Farrakhan
replaced
the eliminated Malcolm X, so it was that Jesus was maneuvered into
position to
replace the executed John the Baptist, who had, I’m guessing, become a
bit of a
problem for the Roman overseers.
The
message that the emergent
messiah delivered to those living under the brutal hand of those Roman
occupiers was, by any rational analysis, exactly the wrong one. It was
a
message brimming with advice about loving neighbors and turning cheeks
… a
message that constantly reinforced the notion that it was better to be
poor and
oppressed than wealthy and powerful, for the poor, you see, were going
to spend
all eternity in the glorious ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ while the rich were
going to
burn in the fires of Hell (unless they were somehow able to steer their
camels
through the eye of a needle, or something like that).
It
was, in other words, a belief
system seemingly designed specifically to suppress any thoughts of
rebellion
amongst the unwashed masses. And the beauty of it was that no one would
find
out if the fabled Kingdom
of Heaven
actually
existed until it was too late for them to get a refund.
I know what you’re
thinking here: “But Dave, didn’t the
Romans execute Jesus, and do so in a horrifically brutal and sadistic
manner –
you know, like in that Mel Gibson torture-porn flick?”
Maybe
they did and maybe they
didn’t. Even if they did, that would not necessarily prove that Jesus
was not a
covert Roman operative. Most all assets are expendable if they become
more
valuable dead than alive. And it’s pretty clear that for the last
couple
thousand years, Jesus has proven his value as a dead martyr. But was he
crucified? I tend to doubt that he was.
Consider
that Mr. Nazareth was
alone by choice when apprehended. He had supposedly wandered into a
garden to
gather his thoughts, or some such thing, allowing Roman authorities to
conveniently apprehend him quietly and without incident. It was almost
as if he
had turned himself in, knowing that he was in safe hands. The most
likely
scenario is that he was replaced with a look-alike at the private palace of Pontius Pilate, where he was
taken to
supposedly be tried and convicted (so to speak).
Bear
in mind that whoever had the
misfortune of resembling Jesus needn’t have been all that close of a
double. By
the time he was beaten, whipped and outfitted with a custom crown of
thorns,
the battered, bruised and bloody body would undoubtedly have been all
but
unrecognizable. And following the crucifixion, as we all know, the
body, uhmm,
disappeared. Because it was, you know, resurrected from the dead. Or
because it
had to be disposed of before anyone caught on that it wasn’t really
Jesus.
Personally,
I’m going with option
#2, primarily because I am not familiar with any documented cases of
bodies
being resurrected from the dead and I’m not really into taking huge
leaps of
faith. But maybe that’s just me.
As
previously noted, the tactics
deployed by the Romans circa 32 AD bear many similarities to the
psychological
warfare operations carried out today. And why wouldn’t they? After all,
not
much has changed in the last 2,000 years, including the identities of
our
overlords. I’m not much sold, as it turns out, on the notion that great
empires
rise and fall. Since at least biblical times, as best I can determine,
there
has only been one empire, though the perceived center of power has
shifted in
what basically amounts to a shell game.
The
Roman Empire, in other words,
did not fall just as its offspring, the British Empire, began to rise,
nor did
the British Empire fall just as its
offspring,
the American Empire, began to rise. No, the Roman Empire quite
obviously
transformed itself into the British Empire, which in turn used smoke
and
mirrors to create the ‘new’ American empire by sending a bunch of
wealthy
Masons posing as ‘Pilgrims’ over to the ‘New World’ and then later
staging a
patently fake ‘Revolutionary War.’ I mean, really people, do you
honestly believe
that the mighty British Empire, at
the height
of its power and with a formidable navy at its disposal, was unable to
suppress
a ragtag rebellion that most colonists had little interest in
participating in?
And
is it, after all, just a
coincidence that the British countryside is littered with Roman ruins?
Or that
the Eastern Roman Empire fell, according to historians, circa 1453 AD,
while
the British Empire began its rise,
according
to those same historians, around 1497 AD? And is it also a coincidence
that the
British Imperial Century (which followed the 1st British
Empire
[1583-1783] and the 2nd British Empire [1783-1815]) ended in
1914,
while the rise of the American Empire (never actually referred to as
such) is
generally pegged to the United States’ entry into
World War I circa 1917?
And
is it just a coincidence that
the overwhelming majority of American presidents have been descended
from royal
British bloodlines? Speaking of American presidents, this seems like a
good
time to segue into a discussion of who our next fearless leader will be.
For
a good many months, I was
fooled into believing that President Blackbush was going to walk away
with an
easy win. After all, it was perfectly obvious that the ‘opposing’ party
had
gathered together an impossibly weak field of contenders, none of whom
appeared
to have any shot at all of occupying the White House, and the
president’s own
party was giving him a free pass in the primaries, despite his
ever-increasing
unpopularity. There didn’t, and still don’t, appear to be any
significant
hurdles standing between Barry O and another four years in the West
Wing.
Nevertheless,
I am now convinced
that the White House will soon be occupied by someone with an (R)
affixed to
his name. But which one will it be? Presumably none of the former
frontrunners
who peaked much too soon and burned out much too quickly, like Rick
Perry,
Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain. And obviously not the also-rans
whose
campaigns never seemed to gain any traction – people with forgotten
names like
Gary Johnson, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman.
Who
then, of the four left
standing, will it be? Newt Gingrich, the most recent of the temporary
frontrunners to implode rather spectacularly almost immediately after
attaining
frontrunner status? Mitt Romney, the fallback frontrunner from the
beginning of
the race, though his support has always been tepid at best? The
improbably
resurgent Rick Santorum? Or Ron Paul, the guy who for many, many years
has been
hailed as a hero by a lot of people who should know better?
Obviously,
Paul appears to have
no chance of grabbing the nomination. But the dirty little secret is
that
neither do Romney, Santorum nor Gingrich. All four will ultimately fall
by the
wayside, as did many others before them in this lengthy campaign. As
was
obvious from the beginning, none of these miscreants has any chance of
winning
the general election, especially after taking a thorough beating
throughout a
tortuously long primary season, but that doesn’t mean that the GOP
plans on
throwing the election to Obama.
No,
what the party plans to do is
go ‘old school’ at the convention. The plan, as is becoming
increasingly clear
with each passing day, is for no one to arrive at the
convention with
the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination. Everything is in
place for
such an outcome, including the shuffling of the primary/caucus
schedule, which
was supposedly done to avoid a rush to judgment and allow more of the
country
to have a say in who the nominee will be. Our elected officials,
however, don’t
seem to care much about how democratic the candidate selection process
is, so
in retrospect it is unlikely that that was the real reason for the
changes,
which also included many states dropping a winner-take-all system in
favor of a
proportional allocation of delegates.
Notice,
by the way, that a
certain Barack Obama doesn’t have to navigate through a system that,
with a
similarly crowded field of Democratic contenders, could very well have
denied
him the delegates needed to clinch the nomination as well. Notice also
the
brazen manipulation in Iowa,
which magically transformed Romney from being the clear frontrunner,
2-for-2 at
the time and heavily favored to go 3-for-3, into being on equal footing
with
both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.
In
addition to changing the
playing field, the newly-created ‘superPACs’ have, for the first time,
enabled
candidates who have no chance of winning to stay in the race long past
their
expiration date. Gingrich at this point is pretty much being financed
by just a
single extremely wealthy benefactor, who has pledged to fund Newt’s
campaign
all the way to the convention in August. The fact that all other
sources of
funding have dried up should have sent Gingrich a clear message that he
wasn’t
a real popular choice for president, but that’s really beside the point
in this
primary season.
Gingrich
is a seasoned pro who
knows the role he is playing, just as Santorum and Paul undoubtedly
know that
they are only remaining in the running to siphon off ‘Tea Party’ votes.
Any one
of them alone, alas, would be unable to deny Romney the nomination, so
all four
will likely slug it out until August, or until it is statistically
impossible
for Romney to clinch the nomination.
So
what we have here, in reality,
is a bit of cleverly crafted theater. The formula seems to be to take
an
unusually large field of candidates, all of whom have more negatives
than
positives, put them through a gruelingly long primary process, complete
with a
seemingly endless series of debates designed to constantly reinforce
those
negatives, mix in a newly engineered playing field and a bottomless pit
of
corporate cash, and what you end up with is a voting public completely
disgusted with all of the choices offered to them.
And that, it appears,
is by design. The plan is not just
to arrive at the convention with no presumptive nominee, but to arrive
there
with rank-and-file voters thoroughly underwhelmed by all the
remaining
candidates. Why? Because, as I already indicated, the GOP plans to go
‘old
school’ – with a brokered convention. What will likely happen is that
there
will be a few votes taken, which will, as planned, fail in anointing a
candidate. Then the big boys will retire to one of those ‘smoke-filled
rooms’
from days of yore, where they will ‘decide’ to bypass all the remaining
candidates and bring in fresh blood.
“Wait
just a minute there, Dave,”
you’re probably thinking. “They may have gotten away with such things
back in
the days of Woodrow Wilson, but surely they couldn’t pull off such a
thing in
these more enlightened times!”
Ah,
but they can and they will.
And all the pundits on all the cable news channels will feign surprise,
as
though no one saw this coming. And all the people in the convention
hall will
stand up and cheer. Loudly. And the people watching on their television
sets at
home will stand up and cheer as well.
They
will cheer despite the fact
that the dumping of the entire field of candidates means that the
entire
primary campaign breathlessly covered by the media – the hundreds of
millions
of dollars spent, the unprecedented number of pointless debates, the
endless
barrage of campaign ads and robocalls, the ever-shifting field of
candidates,
the constant speculation over who the nominee would ultimately be – was
all
just smoke and mirrors. They will cheer despite the fact that it will
represent
yet another brazen attack on basic democratic rights.
I know this because I
have run the brokered
convention/throw-all-the-buns-out scenario past a few of my
conservative
friends and they have told me that nothing would make them happier.
Their faces
light up as if I had just told them that Santa had left a shiny new car
for
them in the driveway. And that is especially true when I tell them who
I
believe the nominee and his running-mate will be – Jeb Bush and Sarah
Palin.
That would be, I am told, a “dream ticket.”
Neither
of the two, notably, has
any real excuse for not having jumped into the race. Palin voluntarily
walked
away from a cushy government job, and Bush has declined to enter
previous races
that he could have easily won, leaving both of them plenty of free time
to
campaign. And it’s not as if the competition is very tough, in either
the
primary or the general election. Why then have both – particularly the
usually
high-profile Sarah Palin – remained unusually quiet through this
raucous
primary season? Most likely to avoid the bloodshed that has
characterized this
campaign and quietly await their late coronation.
Personally,
I think the GOP
should go the Fear Factor route. As some readers are probably
aware, a
recent episode of the series, which was to have featured contestants
drinking
donkey semen, was pulled by NBC shortly before it was to air. Rather
than let
that concept go to waste, and rather than staging yet another pointless
debate,
why not re-shoot the episode with the four remaining candidates filling
in for
the original four teams of contestants? Whoever can drink the most
donkey semen
in the allotted time – or perhaps, given that these are Republican
candidates,
it could be elephant semen – should be Obama’s challenger in the
general
election.
Speaking
of Fear Factor,
did anyone else notice how NBC really dodged a bullet by pulling that
curiously
timed episode? After all, it wasn’t long after that decision was made
that news
began to break of the arrest of LAUSD teacher Mark Berndt on multiple
charges
of having spoon-fed, you guessed it, semen to his blindfolded
elementary school
students, sparking justified outrage from parents across the city and
across
the country. In the wake of the disturbing revelations, it certainly
would not
have cast the network in a very positive light to air footage of
fame-whores
ingesting semen for entertainment.
And
why, one wonders, did they
make such a curiously timed decision? The episode was undoubtedly
tasteless (no
pun intended), but no one at the network seems to have been concerned
when the
semen-eating challenge was conceived, filmed, put through
post-production, put
on the television schedule, etc. So why did it suddenly become a
problem,
almost as if someone at NBC had advance knowledge of the soon-to-break
story?
Such
weirdness is, of course, par
for the course whenever a big pedophile case breaks into the news. And
this one
is shaping up to be a big one, with a second male teacher, Martin
Springer,
under arrest and a female teacher’s aide identified in news reports as
yet
another perpetrator. Parents have been loudly screaming “cover-up,” as
well
they should, with media reports claiming the cases are unrelated
despite the fact
that Berndt and Phillips were friends who took their classes on joint
field
trips, while Berndt and the aide had adjoining classrooms with a common
door
through which they frequently communicated.
As
has been widely reported,
LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy took the unusual step of replacing the
entire
staff at the school, a move widely denounced by parents but fully
supported,
naturally enough, by the local media, who have not been shy about
invoking the
name “McMartin,” as though planting the seeds for what may yet be cast
as
another ‘witch hunt.’
At
least no one involved in the
case, as of yet, has turned up dead, which can’t be said of former Penn State
coach Joe Paterno. I’m certainly not suggesting, of course, that there
was
anything suspicious about the curiously timed death. I mean, sure, he
seemed to
be pretty healthy for a man of his age, right up until he was fired a
couple
months ago for his role in the Jerry Sandusky pedophile scandal, after
which we
almost immediately learned that he had cancer. But it was, we were
told,
treatable, so it was a little strange that he dropped dead just weeks
later,
but shit happens.
And
sometimes when shit happens,
it gets reported before it happens. Like when it was reported in Australia
that
John Kennedy was assassinated hours before he actually was. Or like
when it was
reported on British television that the tower known as WTC7 had
collapsed not
long before it actually did. Or like when a number of media outlets
reported
Joe Paterno’s death some twelve hours before he actually died.
Things
like that seem to arouse
suspicion in some people, though I’m not sure why. It seems to me that
such
incidents represent the very best of journalistic achievements. That
kind of
aggressive reporting, which takes the notion of ‘getting the scoop’ to
a whole
new level, should be applauded. In fact, it should be rewarded with
Pulitzer
Prizes.
In
this particular case, the
premature reports were said to be traced back to what was dubbed a
‘hoax’
e-mail sent by a Penn
State athletic
director.
Can something really be considered a hoax though if it proves to be
true just
twelve hours later?
When
the Penn
State story first broke, a few
scattered reports held that the case ran far deeper than Jerry Sandusky
– that
there were indications that Sandusky
had in fact been pimping out the kids under his control to wealthy
donors. What
appeared to have been uncovered, in other words, was not the depraved
acts of a
lone pedophile, but rather another Larry King/Franklin-type case
involving wealthy
and powerful pedophiles preying on the most vulnerable of children.
And
there were, to be sure,
impressive political connections. The recently departed Paterno, for
instance,
had such names as President Gerald R. Ford and President George H.W.
Bush in
his personal Rolodex (that would be, needless to say, the same George
H.W. Bush
who has himself been accused multiple times of being a sadistic
pedophile,
though the media naturally looks away from such unpleasantness when it
occasionally surfaces). And then there is the Rick Santorum connection,
the
former Pennsylvania senator having
been the
guy who bestowed a congressional award upon Sandusky, a fact that his mudslinging
adversaries have predictably opted not to use against him.
Another
sign that the Sandusky
case runs far deeper than the media would have us believe can be found
in the
curious story of Ray Frank Gricar, the longtime Pennsylvania District
Attorney
who opted not to prosecute Sandusky back in 1998. On April 15, 2005,
just
months before his scheduled retirement, Gricar went missing and has
never been
heard from since. While his abandoned car was found, his keys, wallet
and other
personal effects, including his laptop computer, went missing as well.
His
laptop was ultimately found, but without the hard drive, which was
later found
destroyed.
Gricar
was declared legally dead
on July 25, 2011, just a few months before the Sandusky case broke into the news. To
make
the Gricar story just a little more bizarre, Roy Gricar, Ray’s older
brother,
had gone missing under remarkably similar circumstances back in May
1996. The
elder Gricar’s body was recovered from a river and his death was ruled
a
suicide. Until shortly before his death, Ray Gricar had been working as
a
private contractor at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
Probably
the clearest sign that
there is far more to the Sandusky case
than has
generally been reported was the assignment of former FBI director Louis
Freeh
to oversee the investigation, which immediately brought to mind the
assignment
of former CIA director William Colby to investigate the death of Franklin
investigator
Gary Carradori. Since Freeh’s assignment, predictably enough, the media
have
largely turned away from the case. But that’s okay – I’m sure it was
all just a
witch-hunt anyway.
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