Anybody still trying to come up with New Year's resolutions might want to consider this one:

Never trust anything anyone tells you, especially if it's the government or the mass media doing the telling.

In the past year alone, the U.S. has lived under an administration in the White House that has lied about everything from poetry to weapons of mass destruction. These are openly admitted lies that brought us to war. Bush even says "We found the weapons of mass destruction." But the things he found weren't even weapons. They've "found" weapons of mass destruction going across the Kuwait border from Iraq. (Oops, according to even the Freepers, Fox says they were "artifacts," not WMD. No cigar. Not even close.) Well, they did find some Botox, but from the recent pictures, it doesn't look like Saddam ever used it (and from the "What's the difference?" statements, one could deduce that it doesn't count as a WMD).

The Pentagon faked a "dramatic rescue" mission for Jessica Lynch -- whom Iraqi doctors had already tried to hand over to U.S. troops. (Did that make you feel good? It made me fucking sick!)

Someone in the Bush administration "outed" an undercover CIA operative in apparent political retribution for revealing some of the aforementioned lies. Three months after Bush told the public "I want to know who the leakers are," and "I welcome the investigation," Attorney General John Ashcroft recuses himself from the investigation and replaces himself with an "independent" investigator.

I personally believe the current administration was involved in rigging the California recall to place yet another actor in the governor's office in Sacramento.

The "Department of Be-Very-Afraid" (known to some as "Homeland Security") has adjusted their terror threat level back and forth between yellow and orange depending on the needs of the administration. Just after telling us that they "captured" Saddam Hussein (which we'd been promised would make us safer), the threat level was again raised to "HIGH" once again. And for speaking the truth about this, Howard Dean is said to need rehabilitation and is still called "unelectable."

The media will tell you all about Michael Jackson and even play a tape of him whistling as "proof" that the police didn't abuse him, but you can't count on them to tell you the real deal about really important things. The media in the year 2003 has brought us the unrepentant Robert Novak, the fake Jayson Blair, the opportunistic Rick Bragg, the dark Judith Miller, and too many others to list. As someone imitating an anchor once said:

It's a storm of lies, a blizzard of lies, a hurricane of lies you're living in every day.
We've got you coming and going.
We assault you with so many contradictory messages that you don't know what's going on at all.
You're crazy out of your mind.
You don't know if anything is real.
Anything!

Even in this "blizzard of lies," one can find the truth, though it's not always an easy task. It's certainly not as easy as 2+2, but it's not impossible either.

Verify what you can. Seek out contradictions and other elements that simply don't make sense. If you thought that former Iraqi information minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf was funny (which is not the same as laughing out loud at how obvious his lies were), you're a fool because what you were seeing so clearly when you watched him is exactly what I see every time I see Bush or any news anchor open their mouths.

DISCLAIMER: What you see above doesn't prove anything, but I did use deductive logic to parse the information available to me in order to come up with the conclusions I have presented. (Read The Daily Howler for some lessons.) Don't just take my word for it. As I've said before, question everything -- especially this.