The Mystery of Memory

Is it not blows to the head. Republicans seem to be plagued by memory loss. However, they sometimes practice purposeful amnesia, they conveniently forget. Too many of them leave out pertinent facts. Current news stories are rife with spin, with amazing Orwellian renderings of reality.

What really happenen or did not happen? Former President Bill Clinton and our current president (OCP) are in a battle over who best fought al Qaeda before 9/11. WaPo writer Peter Baker explores the question in a 9/27 article, from which I quote:

The election-year debate over terrorism has triggered a full-blown spat between the camps of President Bush and former president Bill Clinton as the two sides trade barbs over who was more responsible for failing to disrupt al-Qaeda before it could attack the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush complained yesterday that Clinton was engaging in "finger-pointing" by attacking the current administration's actions before the hijackings. "I don't have enough time to finger-point," Bush said. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did, calling Clinton's version of events "flatly false."

Meetings of minds - Reuters reports that three key presidents will sit down together for a meeting in Washington on Wednesday. Mssrs. Bush, Karzai and Musharraf will all be required to practice the highest forms of purposeful amnesia. Quoting the final paragraphs,

Bush will mediate on Wednesday in three-way talks with Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who have accused each other of not doing enough to crack down on militants.
Tensions between the two neighbors have risen as remnants of Afghanistan's former ruling Taliban have regrouped since their overthrow by U.S.-led forces after the September 11 attacks. Afghanistan has seen its heaviest bout of fighting since 2001.

Consistently forgetting the facts - The current administration's leadership style has focused on to focus on the so-called war on terrorism as a way of obscuring failures in the economy, in helping Americans when natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrian hit, etc. Regular fact-checking helps get at more of the truth. "A Misleading Appeal to Fear" at FactCheck.org/ from which I quote, illustrates the tactic:

Pro-Bush group misstates key facts about anti-terror campaign.
September 8, 2006. Appeal to Fear
The ad is a raw appeal to fear, saying "these people want to kill us" while showing weapons-toting fighters and a huge crowd chanting "Death to America." It adds, "Many seem to have forgotten the evil that happened only five years ago," while showing an orange fireball billowing from the World Trade Center south tower as United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into it Sept. 11, 2001.
Strictly speaking, the ad is clearly false on that point. We know of nobody who has "forgotten" the events of 9/11, and we doubt that Progress for America can name a single person who has. If what PFA means by this statement is that "many" people don't see 9/11 as justification for the military campaign in Iraq or the President's domestic antiterror actions, they are correct. Many do disagree.

Who remembers? Senator George Allen and some of his critics differ on whose memory about Allen's racial attitudes is correct, according to a recent story (9/26) by Bob Lewis of Yahoo!News.

References:

1. CNN on "How Memory Works"
2. Perfect Memory
   

   James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped. McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago. Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date. . .
   His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong — or at least incomplete. McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them. But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. . That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience. AJ does have "some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life," McGaugh says. "As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place." So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn't explain why she remembers it." Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.

Tags: bush clinton iraq islam security terrorism war