Kill The Messenger

Herman and I saw an interesting movie the other night, called Kill The Messenger. It was a political thriller based on a true story of Journalist Gary Webb. I enjoyed the movie, but can’t recommend it to anyone who still believes that the US Federal Government gives a rat’s ass about anyone but themselves and the one-percent who pull their strings to make them dance, because this movie will pull their heads out of the sand and they will loose all respect for the people ruling this country.

The plot is about a reporter who uncovers a government plot: When Congress refused Regan the funds to fight his war in Nicaragua, he had the CIA setup an organization that flew billions of dollars of cocaine into major American cities to raise the money so the Contras could buy weapons. Yes, all part of the Iran-Contra scandal. The whole time Regan was telling the country that drugs were our number one problem ripping apart society, and that people should just say no. During the Clinton era, the CIA published a four-hundred page report admitting their guilt, but of course they published it during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the country was so busy being outraged that the President got a blow job that they ignored the fact that, under Regan, the CIA was selling crack cocaine in the nation’s ghettos to pump billions into the defense industry board rooms.

Of course, that was peanuts compared to Bush and Cheney, who started the Iraq war in order to funnel two trillion dollars from middle-class taxpayers to the stockholders of Halliburton, Raytheon, DynCorp International, Hewlett-Packard, Pratt & Whitney, General Electric, Northrop Grumann, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin. Lockheed alone bleeds over thirty-five billion from taxpayers each year. The list of corporate fat cats goes on and on, like pigs at a trough. The crimes these politicians have perpetrated on the middle class are even more horrendous than the torture our government inflicted on POWs in Iraq and Guantanamo.

I sorely wish my father could have lived to see this film. Back in the day, he thought Regan walked on water, while I thought he was the worst president ever, even worst than Nixon (that, of course, was before George W. set the bar at a new low). Dad and I used to argue like cats and dogs over Regan’s shortcomings. I do wish I could rub his face in the fact the Regan was responsible for the CIA selling billions of dollars of crack cocaine to America’s youth.

“But,” he would say, “they were selling crack in the ghettos, to people of color, so who cares? And it was for a good cause, to fight communism.” He would lift his head and with a tear in his eye and admire his hero all the more. Perhaps it’s a good thing he and his kind are dying out.