I doubt there is a human being on the face of the planet that could go into a meeting with the president defect, Bush, and not come out of it a little shaken. They probably had to clear out the coloring books and word jumbles to make room for the meeting. It is funny that you started this thread, because I noticed his body language too.
Maybe, and just maybe here, we have the wrong idea about the nature of our politics and leadership. Perhaps we concieve of a nefarious agenda that does not exist. Please hear me out:
The United States was founded for a host of different converging reasons - no one single cause led to the revolution. The Glorious Revolution of the 1680s in England allowed their political philosophers to finally participate in the Enlightenment discussions about the nature, ethics, and structure of power in Europe - which naturally led to articulations of how it could be different and better. The Protestant Reformation had unleashed the forces of individualism in spirituality. There had always existed, just below the surface of well ordered, patriarchal English society, a sentiment of resentment harbored by the masses toward their economic, political, and spiritual "betters." Add the situations peculiar to the colonial experience and you have even more reasons: 1) four wars fought against the French in Canada for the express purpose of colonial expansion and land acquistion, and then being told "no one except military officers or Indians get to live in the newly acquired lands" by the imperial government, 2) poor economic conditions caused by taxation, trade monopolies, land shortages, and a lack of currency, 3) having an ocean between parents and children in the age of the sailboat. No one single reason caused the American Revolution, but the effect was dramatic.
They created a system where the people's voice counted. It wasn't perfect - slaves, women, and Indians didn't count, and then there was that whole Civil War thing - but it was the start of a political system that does allow for free debate, the exchange of ideas, the peaceful transfer of power, etc. As broken as the political system was and remains, it does work at a fundamental level - voters still get to vote, and that vote does count. That government gets away with so much rank corruption, back door deals, and party driven conflict is not because our politicians are somehow more degenerate than the masses, it is because the people have grown so complacent and disinterested in the system. They care so little about the maintenance of democracy that they simply don't participate - they are lazy, bereft of their sense of civic duty. Perhaps our politicians are no more corruptable than we are, but we give them the high power of the land and then quit paying attention until our sensationalist media catches them soliciting teenage boys for sex, or taking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of home renevations from oil industry magnates. Maybe we NEED an all powerful NWO/Illuminati to exist for us to assuage our own guilt for being less involved in our own communities.
With that being said, I do believe that there is a PTB power structure that we see, and one we don't. I differ, I think, with most here because I don't believe them to be as unified or as powerful as they are made out to be. There is definately a lack of accountability that comes with the lack of transparency, and that I believe is dangerous, and has led to some pretty rotten things. But I also believe that at least in the United States, it is not so far gone that the people have no control. Best case scenario is that we begin to pay attention to our politics, and begin voting in the right people - from the local city council and school board, to the POTUS. Worst case scenario, we water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. Either way, we still have the fundamental control that we have had since the late eighteenth century. Voter turnout, in a truly free society where voting is a choice but a universal right (not a privilage or mandatory), can be indicative of a lot. Poor voter turnout has marked our last few decades, and nature hath given us so often a turkey instead of a lion. Obama has bucked that trend. Is his rise engineered by the PTB, or is his presidency the result of a new political awakening? Or the result of a faction of the PTB that has had their own awakening, or a change of heart?
Also, perhaps Obama was made aware of some of the very things that are terrible, that we think "they" know and are keeping from us? Maybe he is getting the "real deal" briefing about what is really going on that we all wish we could get? Remember how you felt the first time you entertained the notion that we are not alone in the universe, or that we might be headed toward a global cataclysm that we can't really do anything about, except survive? Perhaps that is what he is dealing with. I am hoping - not convinced - that Obama represents an open window of opportunity for disclosure, or rather disclosures, for I think there is a great many things it is time for the people to come to terms with. This guy might be enough of an outsider to get it done. Here's hoping, huh?
