Life is a series of tests of our integrity. Do we pass? Do we fail? I know there were times in my youth when I compromised my integrity in order to be popular, and wow, did that hurt. It hurt more than not being popular, to be honest.

That’s why I’m not sad that I was banned yesterday from Daily Kos.

I knew I was always a hairs’ breadth from being banned because my posts deal largely with the conspiratorial side of history. But specifically, the post that seems to have tipped the bucket was my calling out of a couple of the site moderators. This isn’t about them so I’m leaving their names out. It’s about the challenge to act with integrity, and why I felt the need to stand up.
Here is the quote to which I took offense:

Take a wild guess as to why people like me, who put frontpage posts up about the Ohio irregularities and looked at the public Diebold code analysis Bev Harris’ team put up to verify the holes her team found, don’t do it anymore. Why [x], someone who was promoted to the frontpage partly because of her treatment of this issue, doesn’t touch this crap much anymore.

Because we’re embarrassed to be seen with “prove me wrong” people who can’t differentiate between the true things and the fakes, and insist on humiliating everyone else around them.

And here is my response, my last, at Kos:

So you’ve stopped talking about one of the most important issues of our time for fear of personal embarrassment?

Geez. I’m sure glad I didn’t let that stop me in my Kennedy assassination research. I had people writing me telling me Richard Helms was secretly Howard Hughes, that the driver killed Kennedy, that Elvis shot him from a UFO and all that crap. But I never stopped pursuing the truth just because idiots chose to follow a similar path.

I stood up, kept telling the truth as I saw it, and never let the idiots speak for me.

Gosh, [y]. I hope you and [x] grow back whatever parts of spine you’ve lost. It’s still important. And the stupid arguments will go unbelieved and ignored, as they have and will always be. There are always those with a low standard of evidence. There are also those with too high a standard of evidence (i.e., I won’t say it until everyone on the planet agrees its true). At some point, you have to stand up for what you believe. I’m really disappointed to read this, and hope maybe you have a better explanation, because this one really sucks, bigtime.

I’m a shy person, with people I don’t know. I’m terribly sensitive. I can be hurt to tears in an instant. Have been. Often. Most days of my life, it would seem.

When I first joined the online world, I got involved in a newsgroup called alt.conspiracy.jfk. I quickly had my every post stomped on, chopped up, misquoted, denied, raged upon, etc. It was a frightening experience, to be honest, at first. But it made me tough. So tough that I sometimes forget how sensitive others who have not had to weather the storms yet can be. But weather them I did.

My point is, if I, little miss cry-at-the-drop-of-a-hat, can withstand the ridicule, the abuse, and not only survive but make it onto National TV (Discovery Channel / Conspiracy Files – the “CIA Mind Control” segment, re-airing on June 22 – check local listings), what are others afraid of?

A lot of people are stronger than me, have better lives, more going on, more friends, more comfort. They, of all people, should be braver as they have less to lose and lots to fall back on.

In this case, you had two moderators of a huge site backing down for fear of having to be associated with the rabble. As mentioned above – I’ve had to fight, for some fifteen years now, being grouped with all the nutcases in the bag called “conspiracy theorist.”

So did I jump out of the bag? Hell no. I knew there was truth in there, and kept digging around. Along the way, I found out something interesting. Presidents. Heads of State. People I really respect, like Gore Vidal. All CTers. As are all the CIA people I’ve ever met. In fact, they see conspiracies where I wouldn’t even think to look, because they KNOW what goes on.

Yeah. I don’t like being grouped with nutheads who think “the driver shot Kennedy”, or George Bush shot Kennedy, or – yeah, it’s out there – Jackie hired someone to kill Jack. I despise that kind of ridiculous crap. And often, the people pushing that crap link back to the government. The standard way to hide something is to discredit it as a conspiracy theory, and then offer ridiculous counter-theories that cannot possibly be true and promote the worst of them with one hand so as to ridicule them with the other.

That’s why my heros are different than some. My heros are people like Steven D, who is not afraid to call it as he sees it, who doesn’t shy away for fear of being grouped with others less worthy.

My new hero of the moment is Craig Unger, who, unlike the rest of the media, went after the question I’ve been asking others since day 1: Who forged the Niger documents? To me, following that thread leads directly to those responsible for taking us into war on a deliberate lie.

It was no surprise to me that people in the media didn’t want to follow that story. That would make them unpopular with the administration. And unpopularity leads to lack of access, and lack of access can be a career ender. So I was really heartened that Unger and Vanity Fair were willing to follow this story, wherever it would lead. These stories are tough. They take time, and time means money. Mostly, it requires a reporter to be good, i.e., to dig in and not take the easy way out. As Unger explains:

Unraveling a disinformation campaign is no easy task. It means entering a kingdom of shadows peopled by would-be Machiavellis who are practiced in the art of deception. “In the world of fabrication, you don’t just drop something and let someone pick it up,” says Bearden. “Your first goal is to make sure it doesn’t find its way back to you, so you do several things. You may start out with a document that is a forgery, that is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, which makes it hard to track down. You go through cutouts so that the person who puts it out doesn’t know where it came from. And you build in subtle, nuanced errors so you can say, ‘We would never misspell that.’ If it’s very cleverly done, it’s a chess game, not checkers.”

Reporters who have entered this labyrinth often emerge so perplexed that they choose not to write about it. “The chances of being manipulated are very high,” says Claudio Gatti, a New York-based investigative reporter at Il Sole, the Italian business daily. “That’s why I decided to stay out of it.”

Despite such obstacles, a handful of independent journalists and bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic have been pursuing the story. “Most of the people you are dealing with are professional liars, which really leaves you with your work cut out for you as a reporter,” says Joshua Micah Marshall, who has written about the documents on his blog, Talking Points Memo.

So far, no one has figured out all the answers. There is even disagreement about why the documents were fabricated. In a story by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, a source suggested that retired and embittered C.I.A. operatives had intentionally put together a lousy forgery in hopes of embarrassing Cheney’s hawkish followers. But no evidence has emerged to support this theory, and many intelligence officers embrace a simpler explanation. “They needed this for the case to go to war,” says Melvin Goodman, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. “It serves no other purpose.”

I feel those who deny a conspiracy to steal the election in 2004 (whether or not it was ultimately successful) are at best, naive, and at worst, agents of the coverup. There’s a lot of range in between as well. It’s easier to say hey, someone put some numbers together that “prove” the exit polls really were wrong, phew, I can go back to sleep. It’s much harder to look at something you don’t understand, like math for most people, and see that mathematicians can lie just like anyone else, and that unless you are of equal stature, you should not believe them just because they say it is so.

In the Kennedy assassination, one of the figures trotted out to rebut notions of conspiracy over time has been a Nobel-prize winning scientist! But the guy has also been on the CIA payroll. In which capacity is he espousing his “science” on the case (science which others have discredited, by the way)?

Unger’s article is a marvelous journey into a deception, and I think he has the tiger by the tail. He can’t prove it, and no one is going to take his suspect to court. And it may never be proven. But Unger may have gotten it right. At the very least, he tried, and made a valiant effort.

Those are the people we need to support. Not the journalists who lick the hands that feed them. There are very few real journalists in this country. I was going to say Greg Palast, but technically, he lives in the UK. But there are a few. Robert Parry. Robert Koehler. Robert Kennedy Jr. He’s not really a journalist, but he did a better job on the election than anyone else in the mainstream in putting the facts together into a picture that could be comprehended.

All of the above, and the others like them that have stood up and told the truth, have been ridiculed and jeered along the way. That’s life. Get through it. And get on with it. If you let hurt feelings start determining what you will or won’t post, what you will and not allow on your blog, the world becomes a poorer place.

I have to say in closing I support Booman’s sentiments. And I wouldn’t tell anyone not to go to Daily Kos. Despite the censorship of key issues, there’s some great writing there. There are important discussions on some issues. I would just hope people wouldn’t start to define their own world by Kos, and start to absorb the groupthink there as to what is real and what is not real. Kos wants to be mainstream. And he’s getting there. But not by any path I would choose. It’s not even a destination I would choose. I’ve never sought to be “mainstream.” I’ve sought the truth. And in places I have found it. Sometimes I am fortunate enough to be able to share it with others. And that feeds my integrity. And, amazingly, sometimes even my popularity. 😉