Gubernare Mente

Straw man [noun] "A person compared to a straw image. A sham argument set up to be defeated." -Oxford American Dictionary.

So this is what's been on my mind, Social Assassination and shock politics. Again.
The strongest recent example might be Republican Sarah Palin's positive remarks about Rand Paul, Ron Paul's Libertarian son. It's like the movie The Cooler, in which the casino puts a guaranteed jinx beside a player that's starting to win.

On a larger but more insidious scale, we have the oil spill. The big one. The greatest straw man of them all.
We shall call this sham argument Commentator Rush Limbaugh and President Barack Obama.

"...It's as natural as the ocean water is." -Rush Limbaugh referring to crude oil in the gulf. Shallow thought process: 'right wing = idiots.'
Obama's visible response to the oil spill is largely limited to a 'listen guys, we need to do something' conference almost a month later. Shallow thought process: 'left wing = idiots.' But what if they're not idiots? What if it's just business?
This is Obama's 9/11 and Katrina rolled into one. Yet another disaster site that's being closed to the media, civilians and investigators, guaranteeing that disinformation and guesswork rules. Both sides are doing what they do best, watching the catastrophe build in hopes that it will flatten the other guy.

Here's my problem with the situation: BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded on April 20 because of a valve failure. BP allegedly had a newer, better valve ready but weren't allowed to use it. Naturally, there were no survivors.
On May 26th, the BP/Alyeska Pipeline shut down Prudhoe Bay's Fort Greely pump station 9 because of a valve failure and simultaneously, the Associated Press linked BP to the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in 1989. There was another spill in Singapore after a tanker collision but it disappeared in the media blitz. It's not the bottomless artesian in Louisiana. The spills came like a rash of school shootings or snipers. (Where are they now? What, did kids quit wishing for the murder-suicide because they equate it to terrorism?)
This on the heels of George W. Bush, the little horn of the oil industry. When W was running for office, he was a slick, nearly bulletproof lawyer with Cheney as an unsinkable battleship. Then 9/11 happened and Bush's IQ dropped faster than Clinton's pants. He went after Iraqi oil with Clinton's 1998 WMD modus, which left a perfectly ugly image for anyone anywhere in the oil industry. It's awfully convenient timing, isn't it? There is such a thing as a social assassination. People have appeared at a peaceful protest with bandannas on their face to throw rocks at cops and then disappeared before everyone was arrested. BP was the most successful at promoting a green image and now, it's toast. I'm not saying that BP is clean, far from it, but this smells like a social assassination.

On the upside, green companies can expect a banner year. Windbaby stocks were sold out at their alt. energy premier. The Nissan Leaf is sold out even though it hasn't hit production yet. Mercedes, Toyota and Tesla are joining forces to produce serious electric cars for the average consumer, as opposed to Tesla's current luxury electric bracket. Hopefully it won't be a dork-mobile. Maybe biodiesel markets will do something interesting, since it doesn't require fermentation (time) like ethanol. Who knows, maybe a freak occurrence of social awareness, corporate opportunism and scientific labor can stem the destruction. Green is the new black.
...Or, y'know, the escaping gasses and crude oil will cause geological instability, earthquakes will weaken Louisiana dikes just as hurricane season sets in and FEMA will find another way to take rights away.

The festering corporate corruption is ruining the name of our "democracy experiment," but maybe that's the point. In any case, please suspend final opinion until you have the whole story. Don't surrender to blind fear or rage yet lest you miss something important. Watch them carefully.

Oh yeah, gubernare mente is Latin for mind control.