Pearl Harbor

Today is the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. According to news reports, this is the last time the survivors of that attack will gather at the Arizona Memorial in Hawaii. That saddens me, because I'm a huge WW2 buff and would like to some year be able to visit that memorial on Dec. 7th. It appears that the time for that has run out. We're losing an important link to an important event in the consciousness of this country. Just for the record, I think the Roosevelt Administration could have put all the intel pieces together to see that Japan was going to attack Hawaii, but don't believe that they did. The attack was done in secrecy and was not aided in any way by Roosevelt. At the time of the attack, battleships were considered the centerpiece of any naval battle. If Roosevelt had really wanted Japan to bloody America so he could declare war, I doubt he would have allowed his precious battleships to take the brunt of the damage. It wasn't until later that aircraft carriers became the dominant chess pieces in naval operations. We suffered a huge loss of life, and whenever something catastrophic occurs, conspiracy theories arise from those who have an ideological reason to dislike those who were in charge at the time. The same thing is occuring today. Those who dislike Bush, or at least Republicans, believe somehow there was a vast conspiracy to blow up the Twin Towers in NY on 9/11. Today's conspiracy theorists are just as misguided as those who thought Roosevelt was behind the attacks on Pearl Harbor. I am glad that today we have things like Popular Mechanics magazines that take on the conspiracy theories and debunk them. No amount of factual information will disabuse the theorists of their bogus beliefs, because they aren't based on facts, they're based on bias.