On November 7, 2000, I was watching the presidential election very closely. I stayed up late and had already searched county level results in Florida long before it became the focus of national media.

I already knew what kind of person George Bush was. Even though his military record had been scrubbed down to only a dozen documents, it was still clear that he had signed up for a six year stint and then served six years and six months. That extra time wasn't for good behavior. His wealth was the result of cashing out on three oil companies while he ran them into the ground, then he bought a baseball team and got the city of Arlington to pay for a new stadium before selling the team at a huge profit. A classic case of socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

This info came to me from a website called Bush Watch: A daily aggregation of Bush related hyperlinks. So even before 9/11 I had read the PNAC Project For A New American Century. In July I read the Newsweek blurb about Attorney General John Ashcroft announcing he would not fly commercial airlines for the remainder of his term due to "safety concerns."

In the summer of 2000 George Bush's approval numbers were tanking. And then he went on vacation. There was no semblance of concern on his part.

So, when 9/11 did happen my hackles had already been raised. I never for a minute believed the official narrative - which was that a month after a presidential daily brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the U.S.," our president was informed that a plane struck one of the World Trade towers, called his national security advisor, and was left with the impression that "it was one bad pilot."

After that, it was pretty easy to see all the Iraq war propaganda for the BS that it was. Yellowcake and centrifuges and 20 year old stockpiles of rusty munitions were just a cover story for a done deal.

Even then I could tell that Americans were being conditioned for war. Half a million dead Iraqis desensitized us to the gruesome realities of war. All of it justified with the new American mindset - Muslims bad, Judeo-Christians good, every time without exception.

I never understood America's love affair with Israel, why we continually funnel billions of dollars into that country so they can afford nice things like nationalized healthcare while we do without. We have elevated their well-being above ours. A 2000 year old book says that adherents of the predominant religion in our country should treat Israelis as the chosen people. The sooner we can return the Jews to the holy land, the sooner the rapture will occur! This is the unspoken rationale behind our support of Israel and the gradual conditioning of Americans to hate Muslims.

Israel's war with Hamas has very little to do with Gaza. Oh sure, it's part of a decades long effort to reclaim that land, but it's really about exterminating 2.5 million Palestinians. Israel's pugnacious provocation of Palestine is really an excuse to launch salvos into the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. It's a way to blame Iran for any retaliation.

During my lifetime, a nuclear war with Iran has always been unthinkable, but make no mistake about it, we are being slowly conditioned to believe in the inevitability of this conflict.