Patrick Smith writes: Summertime, and the chicanery is easy. The Obama administration’s latest rendering of our invisible but eternal “terrorist threat,” I mean.
After a week of ghost stories about an imminent but vaporous plot on the part of an al-Qaida “affiliate” — this is the big new word — it is hard to decide which is more disheartening: 1) The White House’s blithe if clumsy deployment of factoids, 2) the supine complicity of the media (and this, frankly, is my choice), or 3) the willingness of honorable liberals and capital-D Democrats to go along with the show simply because Obama is maestro and one stays with Obama no matter what he does.
Nothing can be said for certain as to what prompted the State Department to close more than 20 embassies and consulates in the Middle East and North Africa last Sunday, and this is by design. But it is no excuse not to raise the possibility that Americans are eating a summer salad of nonsense served to justify objectionable surveillance practices now coming in for scrutiny.
This prospect seems so self-evident that one feels almost silly raising it, except that so few have. Let us insert it into the conversation. To me, the silence among our newspapers and broadcasters on this point confirms only how dangerously circumscribed American political discourse has become. It is all text and subtext now, and the subtext, by definition, is known but never allowed to pierce the surface of silence. [Continue reading…]
False flags, paranoid reactions, a “Nuclear” attack from a friendly Alie, “Chicken Little Syndrome”, deflecting the heat, etc.! Congress beats feet out of doing the job that they were elected to do, (for what ever they did so far this year, they surely don’t deserve a 5 week vacation on the taxpayers). This has more hallmarks of the “Keystone Cops”, then a truly intelligent administration. Perhaps it was cover for the A.I.P.A.C. signers and the “O” endorsing the Israeli announcement of building more settlements in the occupied territories? I ask this one question, when is the name change going to be? What name change, from the U.S.A. to the U.S.I.
We don’t have a media in the US. We have a propaganda machine. The longer we believe in American mythology, the more victimized we will be.
There never was much of threat, arguably — consider the weaponry available to the Bad Guys— though at one point there was an actual organization whose ragtag efforts could have been stopped by a display of minimal competence. Now every local insurgency of a certain ideological stripe calls itself AQ-at-where-I-am, and there’s a kind of mutual inflation pact with the US military/intelligence sector which is proving highly beneficial to all participants. This is the way the world ends, it seems — with lots of little bangs and a whole lot of funding.