who's on first?

It's amazing the things that start coming into view the more you pay attention to politics. I'm going to liken it to my love for dried cranberries. Dried cranberries probably make up approximately .5% of the blood that's being pumped through my body, I eat them so often. The same can be said for havarti cheese, and the same also could've been said about Pepsi back in middle school. But let us concentrate on dried cranberries. When you eat or drink something enough, your tastebuds get a feel for minute differences between batches. No two bags of dried cranberries are the same, and there are bags that are too sweet, too oily, too dry, too clumped, too raw, too crystallized, etc. Then there are the bags that are just right, and you know it at first taste.
When I started paying attention to the news and to politics, I mean, really paying attention about two months ago, at first it was all so new, like I never looked at the news before. I think that I was only pretending to myself before. I started making connections between news stories, searching for a second opinion, clarifying vague quotes and ambiguous references, looking up individual names, their voting record and past quotes. Not all of this stays in my mind of course, but as time goes by I feel that it's becoming easier and easier too keep track of all these things to myself.
One realization I came to recently is that I have no idea who's running the world. On one hand, there is the idea of these invisible webs of money and corruption that are spun all around the world, and no normal person can ever see them or really know what's going on. The whole Big Brother idea. But then, I listen to the news and it's as if the supervisors at McHenry library got together and decided to attack Iraq, or resolve the Darfur crisis, or set up missile defense systems in Azerbaijan. They have all these fancy gadgets but no one really knows what they do exactly and the experts have communication issues with the governement, and the people who are supposed to be making these decisions aren't even reading the official reports because, oh I don't know, they spilled their morning coffee all over them and their assistant who has the second copy is off sick. And besides, even if they did read it who's really gonna understand all that scientific mumbo-jumbo, right? After all, they are humans and they think about death just like the rest of us do, and when they do die, they will rot, like the rest of us, and they know that. When your human courage is tested so many times as you climb your way to the top of the chain of command, few in the history of mankind, would be strong enough to not slip up at least once.