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06/19/2005: "Monkey Video"

The US has earned remarkable international acclaim over the last several years for being duped by right wing operatives. Today’s spotlight dupes are the Iraqi Invasion and the Schiavo Video. With the Downing Street Memo, we now have “smoking gun” evidence that the Bush Administration’s plan from Day 1 was Whatever It Takes to ensure there was a pretext for war. What It Took was cooking intelligence and sabotaging attempts at mediation of the dispute over WMD, weapons which of course turned out not to exist. We’ve also just discovered that the key piece of “evidence” in the Schiavo case, the video created by her parents, was similarly fabricated. This was the video that had a decisive impact on the case, convincing many that Terri was responsive to her parents and thus not really in a comatose state like, say, Tom DeLay’s father (whom as you will recall expired after Tom pulled the plug on his respirator). We now know that the Terri video was a cooked as the intelligence on Iraqi WMD. They reportedly took 10 hours of video, and snipped it down to a short segment where she seemed to be responding to her mother. We now know that she was blind, and therefore incapable of such a response. Her apparent responsiveness was entirely due to the “Encyclopedia Britannica” effect, coined from the famous definition of eternity as the time it would take a monkey typing randomly to author a typo-free version of this multi-volume tome. If you point a video camera long enough at a person making random movements, eventually you’ll catch them doing something seemingly significant, even if they are blind and brain-dead such that there can be no reality behind these motions. This is the principle behind many of the laughs on America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s why, for example, a tree can be seen to wave back in return to a friendly greeting. While the Schiavo video was the most influential recording since the Zapruder film, it had the same level of cynical artifice as a wartime propaganda film. And, considering the right wing’s delight in heating up the culture wars, that’s exactly what it is!