Thus, the media avoids discussing the actual issue raised, while managing to discredit the testimony at hand. We expect such folks to act in secret, and to issue well-crafted PR statements when called for wrongdoing. If they did otherwise, we'd doubt their competence and wonder why they were in their jobs. So we live in a system which makes most of its important decisions on a conspiratorial basis, and yet discussions of conspiratorial actvity are dismissed on a blanket basis by the media. The result is that there is little public discussion of the real issues behind the events of the day.
Conspiracy theories deserve one helluva lot more respect.
Thus we must think for ourselves. From such a perspective, most government actions make a great deal more sense than one would assume from the political rhetoric. The Libya situation is I think a classic current example. We are told that only a nuclear strike can close the plant down. Now this is simply absurd.