It’s a hell of a burden, being right all the time.
Well, I’m certainly no stock-picker. Don’t know who’ll win 2023’s World Series. And haven’t a clue how much Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 will gross in its opening weekend.
But when it comes to public policy, I can’t recall a time when I made a call and got things wrong. From the X-33 to lockdown lunacy, when you understand history, public choice, and sociobiology, your skills as a prognosticator of the unintended consequences of government action are damn tight.
My biggest asset, though, is that I don’t play for Team Red or Team Blue. I play for Team Truth.
I don’t find an argument persuasive or baseless because my tribe is making it. I don’t do tribalism at all. Couldn’t care less what a politician or a pundit or an “expert” thinks. I determine reality using facts, evidence, logic, and reason, and the FELR model has never let me down.
Like many people, in the weeks immediately after 9/11, I feared our lives had changed forever. Terror attacks at home would become frequent. “World War IV” was upon us, and it could last a very long time.
But weeks turned to months, and months turned to years. It became more and more obvious that “things will never be the same” was drama queenery. My assessment began to resemble Seymour Hersh’s description of what a senior spook suspected:
He … said at the time that there was a debate about whether the attacks were a long-planned, deep-cell operation, and we were going to be looking at cell operations like this throughout the country — major embedded groups of Al Qaeda, what you will. The other possibility was that the nineteen hijackers were the equivalent of a pickup basketball team that made it to the Final Four. His guess was the latter.
Unfortunately, well before 9/11, America’s traditional level-headedness had given way to hysterical overreaction to any perceived threat. In such an environment, it was easy for opportunists to “sell” a war on Saddam Hussein as a means to ensure safety at home.
None of the justifications offered for the invasion and occupation of Iraq passed the FELR test. But of all the flaky marketing, nothing was more absurd than the conspiracy-theory stuff. So near the end of 2002, I pitched a piece on the subject to The American Conservative, a new magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodoracopulos. “Roswell, the Grassy Knoll, and Saddam” ran in the January 13, 2003 issue.
Time has been rather kind to my exposé. In 2023, Hussein’s tinfoil-hat haters possess just as much evidence as they did in 2003.
Enjoy some of my best work!
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J. W. Reser will probably have a Blue Christmas this year.
Just a few months ago, he was a Tulsa International Airport police officer and a key witness in a blockbuster congressional investigation some believed would finally reveal the cover-up behind the second-worst terrorist attack in American history.
Today, Reser has lost his job, his testimony has been discredited, and he soon may be indicted for lying to Congress.
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