You're remembering discussion of this.

Couldn't it just be that the GOP generally disliked Clinton and wanted to take him down and the timing was a coincidence? The Dems have been trying to take down Trump in the same manner.

Why was the missile attack so important to cover up? What would make all that trouble worthwhile?

Perhaps I did misunderstand. You're saying that Clinton intentionally launched airstrikes to take the heat off himself from the sex scandal?

To which airstrikes are you referring?

Kind of like Trump w/ Syria & Afghanistan bombing?

rip van winkle over here

What year is it?

He launched cruise missiles into Afghanistan targeting al-queda. This was public knowledge, not hidden at all, heavily reported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infinite_Reach

Republicans said he was only doing it to distract from the Monica Lewinsky investigation.

Could it be related to some of the events here?

http://pastebin.com/raw/jeeBdyQK

Bunch of horrible shit that happened to Eastern Europe in the 90s.

Ahh yes, the vast right wing conspiracy! Isn't that when Hillary started saying that? More seriously, I was a little surprised by how much the internet called bs on LV, seems like more people are becoming open to the idea of conspiracies and distractions.

Fun fact: it was Harvey Weinstein that hired journalist John Connolly to write the smear book The Insane Clown Posse, which was an expose on the Kenneth Starr investigative team. Harv gave Connolly a Miramax Book deal after he found out Connolly was poised to do a write up on Miramax and Harvey. Connolly pitched a book but was told to do the Kenn Starr smear job.

But just more right wing conspiracy...

It's popular still. Do you see all the "4d chess!" type of comments?

not from msm

It's only discredited when used against liberals.

GOP started accusing the CLintons (both of them) of conspiring to create news

What happened was the Republican Congress passed a deadline for Iraq to comply with conditions. The bombing by Bill Clinton occurred upon that pre-existing deadline .

This was right around the time of the 1998 election too.

Then, the Republicans accused the Democrat of "wagging the dog." The "dog" was already at the food. The deadline was set.

Here's where it gets really weird. The Republican House rescheduled the impeachment hearings to coincide with the deadline.

TL;DR Republicans played with dates to create a "wag the dog" scenario.

"Wag the Dog" was a movie that came out in the 90s and is about this.

I've recommended this movie a lot to folks lately. Another notch in the soft disclosure movie categories.

Will never forget the look on our daughter's face when the light bulb popped on for her while watching this movie. She made the connection to so many real-life shenanigans had been miss-represented in the media at when announced and then the truth being found out to have been bad business by TPTB later on.

This film should be mandatory viewing for an engaged citizenry.

This film should be mandatory viewing for an engaged citizenry.

It is a terrific film, no doubt. What gets me is how many people who have seen the film, a film about literally faking war, still believe the complete nonsense of Crazy 'Kim Jong' and the other boogeymen on their telescreen.

Any sane, objective people with open eyes out there, I recommend you go back and look at footage from even the Iraq 'shock and awe' campaign.

Once you see what I a talking about, things will never be the same for you again.

"Go big or go home" seemed to work with 9/11. The shock of the moments was such that folks couldn't/wouldn't question the possibility that the biggest, most 'in your face' deception in broad daylight had just taken place. The balls required to pull this shit off is still hard for me to comprehend.

After typing that, I was wondering how the hell did they get the media on their side and in total lock step...then I remembered the most recent presidential election run up. So one-sided and lock step and the only indication that common folks weren't buying it was the election's outcome.

So how do we, the common people, call BULLSHIT the next time something similar happens?

So how do we, the common people, call BULLSHIT the next time something similar happens?

I used to wonder about that. Eventually I began to question my fundamental notion of 'we'.

What do I really have in common with the regular normie? Honestly, I wonder about this.

The average normie doesn't question things, and gets angry if you bring up simple topics like media fakery. He just wants to be left alone in his average home to watch TV and eat processed food.

Over time I came to see there is no 'we'. There are lots of normies, sure, but they are never waking up in a million years.

well in a sence that is true. But, correct me if I'm rong, wern't you a normie once-upon-a-time?

Did you just happen to know all that you do now, or did you learn all of that infromation from people people that where kind enough to tell you? FOR FREE!!!

Actually the best information I have found has been stuff I have paid for.

I believe, at least part of it, is a type of fear. Not everyone, for sure. Many people really have no idea. But I think nearly just as many people are afraid to even get near that rabbit hole because they know they wouldn't like what they see. And on one hand, I can't blame them.

Even myself I sometimes think how it would just be easier for myself to ignore these puppet shows and move on with my life. But I know I can't. I know that I need to try and educate myself with an open mind and subtly drop hints, ask good questions, steer converstations, without turning those people away.

It's like 'Inception', people have to believe that they figured it out on their own.

I believe part of it is a type of fear. Not everyone, some people have no idea. But I think that nearly as many people are afraid to get near that rabbit hole because they know that they wont like what they'll see. It looks ugly and so they steer clear. On one hand I can't blame them.

I often think to myself how it would just be easier to ignore the puppet shows and move on with my life. But that's impossible. I know that I need to educate myself with skepticism in mind. In addition to education, dropping subtle hints, asking effective questions, and gently steering conversation wherever I can without driving those people away.

Don't underestimate the whole 'all publicity is good publicity' thing. DT was getting quite a bit of media 'support'.

Wasn't there a Bond movie with a similar plot?

"Wag The Dog" and "Enemy of the State" were the original "redpills". Back when have the proven theories everyone is aware now would have gotten you laughed out of parties.

Wag the Dog

was about Iraq1, not clinton.

Wag the Dog is rumored to give Clinton the idea of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory bombing.

The post is unclear ... Clintons used distraction then .... they still do ... what's the point ?

Ron Paul thought Clinton should be impeached because of his action in Iran, not because of his blowjob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ldfDCSG6DQ

To be fair, he was impeached for perjuring himself by lying about he blowjob, not for receiving it

Fair enough, nothing against blowjobs.

Blow jobs are better than no jobs!

Just to be clear, he wasn't impeached(if you're implying it was successful), he was acquitted of the charges https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton

I just keep seeing people use that term that would imply it was successful, I think a lot of us would remember who he was replaced with if he were.

You're right, poor wording on my part.

But does being impeached nessecarily mean he would be removed from office?

Impeached just means indicted. In other words words, to be charged with something.

So, yes, he was impeached but not convicted.

You are correct, although the person I responded to seemed to believe he was successfully found guilty.. I think the term is probably misunderstood by most that use it or see it.. they see it as successfully found guilty. My intent was to say he wasn't found guilty, though you're correct that he was successfully indicted/impeached.

If anyone else is curious https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_in_the_United_States#

I agree with your intent, but not your methodology.

Do not lend credence to mis-use of the term, as it is a form of validation of it.

If it doesn't mean that, don't use it that way just because the other guy is. Someone else could use that out of context to show that either it does mean that, or that you believe it does, even when you obviously don't.

I won't argue, I feel like this word in particular has an actual meaning, versus the way the public uses it which is different, and that creates a problem with being able to discuss it accurately.

More or less, I was trying to argue against the public's popular belief of what it means, and I just argued badly/inaccurately. Plus, I never had coffee today, which is why most of my comments today are likely flawed as well. It's just one of those days.

Gotcha. Hope tomorrow's better, brother.

People still believe Nixon was impeached (he resigned before impeachment), so don't be surprised most people have no idea about how it all works.

That said, I do believe Clinton was impeached (indicted) but not charged. I could be wrong.

I agree, I didn't edit the comment because there's really no good way to explain to them, other than saying "impeached" doesn't mean what you think it does, or how they implied it at least.

wag the dog

Then a funny thing happened. Several significant events took place overseas. One of these was a US cruise missile attack on some terrorist target somewhere. That's when it happened.

This was actually huge, what really kicked off this "war on terror". There were two missiles fired. They sent a cruise missile to Afghanistan and killed a whole bunch on innocent people. And, more importantly, they sent a cruise missile to Sudan and destroyed one of the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa. Here is the wiki page but search other so7urces for more accurate news. This attack showed the rest of the world what the United States really represented. It gave birth to the horrors we see today.

Learned a lot here, cheers

Cheers.

Well... Korea, vietnam,...

The Sudan missile was intended for Bin Laden and they missed. The bad PR led Clinton to ignore Bin Laden and then we have 9/11. It’s really fascinating in hindsight.

Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, not Sudan. The Sudan missile was meant to destroyed one of the only pharmaceutical factories in Africa, nothing more. It was what they wanted to do and that directly lead up to the breakup of Sudan a few years later. They planned all of it.

I believe Hillary called the GOP's attempts a "vast right wing conspiracy". And yet no one ever saw her wearing a tin foil hat.

I think you have to look at the party in power when it comes to the social acceptability of "conspiracy theories", and how the very concept has evolved over time.

As /u/LilyoftheCalla pointed out, Hillary's declaration of a "vast right wing conspiracy" (quoted from a White House memo IIRC) was quite popular because of the leanings of the MSM. They were willing to buy into the idea (but not REALLY investigate it) because of their own confirmation bias.

Similarly, "conspiracy theory" wasn't quite the dirty word it is now (post 9/11).

There's been a push to politicize conspiracy theories as a largely right-wing phenomenon, at least in the mainstream media, since that Sept 11, 2001. Anyone (probably everyone here) is familiar with the the way MSM has portrayed theories about that day. They often lump in and focus on the more outrageous claims with more plausible ones, in essence painting with a wide brush, then adopting the "Truther" label. After Obama's election, they were also able to equate the Truthers with the fringe groups that were carrying around racist signs regarding Obama (oh, and suggesting that they're all "freepers" though that particular term has kind of died on the wayside).

Combine the political climate with the increasingly distracted world (thanks, smartphones), and it's all a mechanism of control, too delicious to believe. That's not to suggest that the idea of smartphones is a deliberate conspiracy, just a lucky happenstance for making people malleable, largely via social media's immediacy, and turning "apps" into addiction is a part of that.

What do I mean by addiction?

Prolonged use of social media (short form writing like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.), particularly on smartphones, lead people to react more emotionally, throwing rational reactions out the door. There's been a few studies that show the neurological reasons for this.

Not a neurology expert, but...

The amygdala elicits emotional responses. For example, when threatened, it's the amygdala that triggers a warning, while the pre-frontal cortex helps you interpret that threat rationally. Take a Hallowe'en "haunted house" attraction. It's your amygdala that makes you scream "Holy crap!" and the pre-frontal cortex that says "Ah, it's only a teenager in a costume." almost immediately after.

The more an individual uses social media, particularly on smartphones for some reason, the weaker the connection between the amygdala and pre-frontal cortex becomes.

Recent studies also suggest the reason an individual allows this to happen, in that whether positive or negative, the brain releases dopamine as you interact on such platforms. Again, using the "haunted house" example, one is rewarded for surviving the scare, even though there's no REAL threat, just a manufactured one.

While I couldn't articulate it clearly because I'm not a neurology expert, I've often felt that this "gamification" of communication is a large component of "outrage culture" online. I know I'm not the only one. It seems a fair number of people in /r/conspiracy are minimal social media users (beyond searching for pertinent info from those who are).

Silicon Valley realized quite some time ago that there's money in addiction, as well. Most of the major services have in-house "gamification" departments using addiction models and algorithms to keep people on their apps for longer periods of time, using a reward model. For startups and smaller companies, there's consulting companies to help you along.

While I've been reading about the addiction model for a while, the following video which aired on CBC a week or so ago had a real impact on a few friends I shared it with (hope it's viewable outside of Canada), because it contextualizes the insidiousness in a mainstream manner...

http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/episodes/2015-2016/addicted-to-your-phone

The advent of a pocketable device that can provide instant distractions to the masses, while making total information awareness available to the alphabet agencies is the one of the most useful tools for shaping opinions ever, in that it distracts people from even wanting to bother with having opinions, especially ones that go outside the normal "Coke/Pepsi" dichotomy.

tl;dr - People are too busy tweeting and snapchatting to be bothered to have their world fucked with by "conspiracy theories".

A government deals with many issues at one time. Just because shit is going down at home doesn't mean the whole world fucking stops everything to wait for Billy Boy to pull his zipper up.

"At the time, President Clinton was embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal, which continued to consume public attention for the rest of that year and the first months of 1999. As it happened, a popular 1997 movie, Wag the Dog, features a president who fakes a war to distract public attention from a domestic scandal. Some Republicans in Congress raised questions about the timing of the strikes. Berger was particularly rankled by an editorial in the Economist that said that only the future would tell whether the U.S. missile strikes had "created 10,000 new fanatics where there would have been none."

Source... the 9/11 Commission Report oddly enough...

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Ch4.htm

Clinton bombed a suspected terrorist outlet but turned out to be an aspirin manufacturer.

Look up Al-shifa in Sudan.

Totally a terrorist act to move attention from the Lewinsky scandal.

Its funny you bring this up. Yes, republicans accused Clinton of "wagging the dog" and distracting us from the Lewinski scandal. Clinton claimed there were religious fanatics running around the desert plotting to kill us.

Hindsight shows that if republicans would have been more concerned about those religious fanatics and less concerned with blow jobs we might have been prepared for 9-11.

Republicans were furious that Bill Clinton refused to bomb everyone in the world after the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Originally, it was intended that George Bush would still be in office, but when that didn't work out, they pressured Bill Clinton to use it for giant wars.

When he didn't, they became very annoyed and decided to create a long list of scandals. During the investigation, they came across a certain blue dress and got him misrepresenting a blow job.

Meanwhile, they created the "wag the dog" scenario, knowing that George W. Bush was about to try to steal an election, create a "new Pearl Harbor" false flag incident, and finally get those wars the Bushes love so much. They wanted to use "wag the dog" preemptively against Bill Clinton so it would look like a copycat when GWB was accused later.

Hitchens has a great doc from that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRw2X3Yg8LA

We bombed an pharmaceutical plant in Sudan the day Lewinsky was to return to the grand jury. Notably, Clinton blamed bin Laden.

It was Sudan. An alleged chemical weapons site that was ostensibly labeled as a pharmaceutical plant.

You've got this exactly backwards. Whitewater was in the news distracting folks from the much more important Rwandan genocide. Four years later Starr investigation was there to distract from, again, the much more important, start of Operation Infinite Reach.

Then a funny thing happened. Several significant events took place overseas. One of these was a US cruise missile attack on some terrorist target somewhere. That's when it happened.

It was Afghanistan and ended up being a real thing in hindsight

Kind of like Trump w/ Syria & Afghanistan bombing?

rip van winkle over here

He launched cruise missiles into Afghanistan targeting al-queda. This was public knowledge, not hidden at all, heavily reported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infinite_Reach

Republicans said he was only doing it to distract from the Monica Lewinsky investigation.