Had I But Known...

Dave Sirota over at Common Dreams has posted his A Decade's Top Ten Quotations. They are great ones. My favorite is number 6:

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know they're some things we do not know. But there're also unknown unknowns; the ones we don't know we don't know." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Feb. 12, 2002, effectively telling us that the government had no idea what it was doing by invading Iraq.

It is very disheartening, to say the least, how egregious these quotes are. Mr. Sirota sums it all up with,

These epigrams expose a nation that has internalized and accepted the forces of avarice, corruption, dishonesty, incompetence and insensitivity. Some of them are darkly funny, some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad -- but all of them are warnings. Whether we listen to them or not will be the difference between repeating the last decade's folly or learning from it.

I'm guessing that the majority of Americans have absolutely no clue that these were actually stated. Perhaps the key to the whole thing is to make quotes like these as ubiquitous as possible, so that the majority of Americans can see how much contempt there is for them from the powerful and elite.