On Ted Nugent’s summer tour of 2011, the cream puff features reporters and free-lancers of the small newspapers of the nation have found it a lot harder to ignore the truth of him than last year.
It’s because things are very noticeably worse now.
Polarization and raging bigots have made the US government paralytic. So an asshole screaming profanity about destroying said government, all his enemies and the President through megawatt amplification onstage isn’t so damn funny or as delightfully idiosyncratic an exercise in free speech as it was in 2010.
When he shares his political views? That’s entertaining, too, in a borderline frightening way.
He railed on government in general and the president in particular. He invited his audience to storm down to Springfield and take it over. Right after an f-bomb-laced barrage, he remarked that it was nice to see children in the audience …
Next, his bandmates – all in helmets now – recreated the famous photo of troops raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima. It was a strange thing to tag on at the end of a concert. But in true Nugent fashion, they triumphantly waved their machine guns …
Nugent is ranting at a furious pace, cramming in more obscenities in three minutes than a roomful of cursing sailors, and undoubtedly saying something shockingly funny, or just shocking.
On Tuesday, many of Nugent’s rants were directed at Canadian visitors. Standing in front of a huge backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, Nugent invited Canadian visitors to “taste freedom.” Nugent later quipped, “I love you Canadians, it’s your government that is (fucked) up.” I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the picture.
There was also a massive one-finger salute to President Barack Obama, for which Ted pulled both hands away from his guitar and thrust two of his middle fingers in the air …
For the grand finale, the band donned military helmets and recreated the famous flag-raising scene at Iwo Jima …
All the reviews have one thing in common. The reporters rate as good only Ted’s old music and shtick, the last part meaning him shooting a flaming arrow into a target during “The Great White Buffalo,” a song which was in his set when he still called the band the Amboy Dukes.
The new stuff is not commented upon. And there’s no getting around the barrage of cursing and damnation leveled at over half the country, foreigners and the government.
The headlines are sometimes polite code for “questionable show” in newspaper rooms.
Nugent is also traveling to Madison, Wisconsin, where it’s now become impossible to ignore his animosity toward unions, teachers and those who mounted the recall against the state’s Republican legislators.
National musicians from Tom Morello to Arlo Guthrie to Ted Leo supported Wisconsin’s union protest movement earlier this year.
Now a musician is coming to town to declare that “government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce.”
Unions? [Ted Nugent] says they’ve brought America to its knees …
Q: On the topic of politics, this year Wisconsin substantially limited the collective bargaining rights of public employees. There were intense protests against this at the state Capitol in February and March. Do you think public employees should have the right to collectively bargain, or do you see unions as too powerful a force in the public sector?
Nugent: “Overall, unions in America have brought this great country to its knees. The NEA has seen to it that American kids are the dumbest kids ever, the auto industry was raped, and government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce. What’s not to despise?”
“The guitar rocker strikes harsh political notes,” reads the subhed.
Believe, at a newspaper the size of this one, it’s as close as a features editor can come to saying, “Jesus H. Christ, what’s with this guy!?”
Here’s Ted Nugent, performing “I Still Believe,” the title song for this tour, in some dive.
While not horrid, you wouldn’t go out of your way to see it. It’s teetotal Ted playing for an audience of white guy drunks with a band a bit better, but not a lot better, than the hard rockers who aren’t famous on off nights in the same place.
This, on the other hand, is not spitefully vindictive, old or embarrassing.
And in it’s snappy drumming take down it destroys stuff like phonus-balonus “I Still Believe” songs and an ass’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Laughter is a far better as remedy and entertainment than mechanized spite.
In Friday’s database crash, emergency backup eliminated the post: “The Party of Howard.”
But it didn’t kill it from my records, so republished, here it is.
UPDATED
[If] you’ve read the Ted Nugent tab for the last two years, [the next bit from the wires is no surprise.]
This is what President Obama seems constitutionally unable to grasp. That even if they are a sometimes useful foil, and (sadly) sometimes equally useful in getting him the policy results he wishes, by definition the Tea Party brigade sees any compromise as evil, because everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan is viewed as a mortal threat to their imagined perfect society, which looks a lot like Utah.
With fewer minorities. And a lot more Jesus …
[Any] compromise, no matter how small, is seen as an act tantamount to treason, which is precisely why we need to stop engaging these tottering tea lovers, because they simply do not believe in the workings of democracy.
The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or even Reagan – the GOP in its current form is nothing more than the party of Ted Nugent – hopefully with somewhat better hair.
It’s true.
Barack Obama doesn’t understand the level of hatred aimed at him every night from the stages of Nugent’s summer rattletrap tour through the heartland. And, by disposition and mental bent, this is the personality he is up against in the GOP House.
I’ve taken two years to follow Nugent on DD blog.
He’s unrelenting and the substantial public record shows him seemingly without a single shred of simple human decency. There’s no bargaining with such a mind, only complete surrender. Like the Tea Party, it’s all Nugent’s way. Everyone else, anyone with differing beliefs, needs to to be run off, destroyed, hit with a crowbar, beaten, hunted down, imprisoned or put to death for the sake of the country.
Last year I proffered a book idea for a modern biography of Ted Nugent as a parallel parable for our times, when lunatic unpalatable extremism, that which was totally unacceptable a decade or so ago, became tolerated and embraced in the mainstream. No one was interested.
Many people, including those in the mainstream media, have no idea how radical and offensive Ted Nugent is because they’ve never bothered to read his columns and track down everything the man’s said when he thinks people not in his core audience aren’t paying attention.
Nugent has paraded around on his summer tours of our dives (and I know the territory firsthand) for the last two years.
The jaunts take him to all the one and two-horse town fairgrounds in the heartland, where he curses out the president, foreigners, minorities, Muslims, everyone not like him and everything a modern society would consider decent and good, from the stages.
Mostly, the locals never complain because Nugent’s audience, those who come for the riffs, are uniformly lower middle and lower class white trash assholes who get in free on county fair omnibus tickets. It’s a demographic that never buys the new records he makes.
However, Nugent also takes the time to peddle his views in the capitol’s Tea Party paper, the Washington Times, and to parlay himself onto regular appearances on Fox and even CNN.
Add to this the people who put Nugent in in the small newspapers of the heartland every week — music journalists/stringers who have generally called the man some manner of quaint, one who is “opinonated??? and “conservative,??? a polite and intelligent person.
Invariably these tyros always ask Nugent if he’s going to run for office. And he always begs off on answering. In any case, Nugent doesn’t have to run for office in 2012. Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, or some other odious GOP reptile, will do the job.
Most of what I have written has shown how Nugent’s most bankable commodity is his role as an outdoorsman’s Glenn Beck. It has nothing to do with his music and everything to do with his reactionary views.
The views are totally unacceptable in a reasonable or thinking human being with a heart.
However, Nugent’s been mainstreamed in the last couple years. You can find him semi-regularly on CNN, where they bring him in for being a colorful character, and regularly on Fox.
Ironically, or stupidly, he’s often on Huckabee because saintly Mike likes to play a pantywaist’s version of old classic rock tunes with long-in-the-tooth rockstars.
The last time Nugent was on Huckabee it was before an old white audience, people who would have never gone to see him, as I and other reprobates did regularly, in the Seventies and Eighties.
When Nugent’s in front of such audiences, an older Tea Party demographic that loves to hear his views on stamping out the parasites and bloodsuckers (words he loves) bringing down America, he stifles the four-letter words for fifteen minutes.
“In which hopelessly inept journalists reduce me to having to debunk a school science project.”(The post as of this moment is temporarily unavailable, though we link to the cache.) The post indicates: “This is, I’m sad to say, clear nonsense. I’ll take this in two parts: one, why his experiment is, unfortunately, completely broken (sorry again). Two, why the imagined result is impossible nonsense.”
This, in reaction to an apparently widely reported story, one I assiduously ignored, on a solar power scientific breakthrough “discovered” by a “13-year-old”:
A 13-year-old who, observing trees, takes it upon himself to read up on the Fibonacci series and propose a way to better utilize solar energy is the feel-good story at its finest. So naturally, media outlets including us [the Atlantic] have been sharing the tale of seventh grader Aidan Dwyer’s solar power “breakthrough” science project.
Journalists don’t understand science, any of the laws of science, matter and energy, the scientific method, critical thinking, mathematics, biology, chemistry, or any other hard science. Period.
Even those with sissypants degrees in majors like “History of Science”
or “Science Writing” or “Science & Health Journalism.”
And I’ve stumbled across them again and again in the last ten years. They can’t write accurately about anything that requires a grasp of the laws of nature and cogent thinking without either being taken in by people playing them or running amok with news of the allegedly miraculous.
This one falls into the latter category: Kid! Disovers! What! All! The! Ph.D’s! Can’t!
Science doesn’t work that way. It didn’t work that way back when Edward Jenner discovered the cure for smallpox, either.
But American journalists and editors love magical and fantastical thinking. And jargon. I would bet one hundred bucks all the people involved in this had to see was an e-mail or press release containing the words “Fibonacci series” and it was off to the races.
Why the New Bombs Al-Qaeda is Building Are So Terrifying
What these stories have to do with is another trait Americans, including journalists, have embedded in their genetic code. And it’s one all the readers of this blog have seen again and again.
The inclination to believe, pass on and recommend rubbish based on the number of others who have adopted belief in the same rubbish.
There’s another way of putting it, much less politely: The belief in the rube that if the number of people spouting the bullshit reaches a certain critical mass it suddenly becomes not-bullshit.
This was also called groupthink and it meant bad brains. But that’s way too nice a term for our times.
Ironically, when this occurs only scientific argument can rip them a new one. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. As everyone can see everyday.
Song, as it applies to everyone involved in this story, not just the employees of MSNBC, the NY Times and the Atlantic, in the slideshow.
Readers may have noticed DD blog went wonk yesterday afternoon.
WordPress’s MySQL database handling on Yahoo is not particularly robust.
In fact, it’s a regular effort to keep the database from going bad. It’s just a matter of how bad things go and when the software decides to warn you by — soonest, or latest — by crashing.
Short story, the “post” table was corrupted, starting sometime earlier in the week. But it didn’t crash hard until Friday after the last Ted Nugent post.
This set off an immediate scramble to repair it, a task the administrative tools — which regularly work — politely declined to do.
So an emergency rollback restore from back-up was done. And that took the blog back to the 13th. Which isn’t a particularly big loss of data.
However, it’s annoying. And during the process of repairing it I was informed, rather helpfully — I might add, by Yahoo tech support that it’s not an uncommon problem with WordPress installations here. Which is why they have a good procedure to help people get back up off the ground.
Which surprised the heck at out of me. Because nothing like it was in place back when I first started using WordPress here and the blog editor crashed and couldn’t be revived, forcing a migration back to Blogger.
Today’s most odious news comes from the New York Times and concerns an alleged plot by al Qaeda in Yemen. And the plot involves — ricin bombs.
Reported by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, the story also appears to be a bit of tease for their book, “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.” set for publication next week by Times Books.
The tome is mentioned in the story. However, Schmitt and Shanker do not really mention they’re the authors, too. One supposes editors thought it obvious.
In any case, readers already are sniffing a self-serving business here.
But on the bit about ricin bombs, news of which must have been communicated to the authors a decent interval ago, news-wise.
American counterterrorism officials are increasingly concerned that the most dangerous regional arm of Al Qaeda is trying to produce the lethal poison ricin, to be packed around small explosives for attacks against the United States.
For more than a year, according to classified intelligence reports, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has been making efforts to acquire large quantities of castor beans …
Long time readers know that no one — that’s NO ONE — has ever developed a “ricin bomb.”
A long long time ago the US military tried. And the only result was an infamous patent for the purfication of ricin. Since the work was done long before scientists understood protein chemistry (full disclosure: DD’s Ph.D. is in protein chemistry) reading it leads a current scientist fluent in the field to realize it actually destroyed ricin.
Ricin is a protein. And proteins don’t like lots of things — like heat, harsh handling, many solvents, being taken out of their natural environment, and … well I won’t go into the rest right here.
And the old US ricin patent used all the things that are hard on proteins. Which perhaps has something to do with why ricin bombs have never been made.
Readers will note the first sentence of the Times piece states that al Qaeda is trying to pack ricin around explosives. Therefore, from this it can be inferred that al Qaeda has no competent scientists working on this project in Yemen.
But onward.
These officials also note that ricin’s utility as a weapon is limited because the substance loses its potency in dry, sunny conditions, and unlike many nerve agents, it is not easily absorbed through the skin. Yemen is a hot, dry country, posing an additional challenge to militants trying to produce ricin there.
In the first sentence, the journalists show that someone in government has told them a little bit of what I’ve just put up here on the nature of ricin and proteins.
But in the same sentence they make this BIG mistake: “[Ricin] is not easily absorbed through the skin.”
Ricin is not absorbed through the skin. Period. Proteins are not absorbed through the skin. If they could be absorbed through the skin you could eat your sandwich by putting the slice of salami on your forearm or pouring your cup of beef bouillon on your stomach.
Proteins are large macro-molecules. And they are not absorbed through the skin — which is made up of keratin — the structural protein that makes up the outer layer of our hide.
Nerve agents are not large molecules at all. In fact, they are quite other things.
In the scheme of things during the war on terror, the US has funded the development of two ricin vaccines. They are not ready yet. However, during development ricin toxicity is tested on rodents. And it is used in an aerosol, not as a contact poison.
It is also purified ricin.
The New York Times story does not make any indication that al Qaeda has purified ricin. In fact, if they are planning on using it with explosives, the likelihood is that they do not have anyone savvy enough to purify it to the state in which it is used for research in the United States.
The Times continues:
Michael E. Leiter, who retired recently as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a security conference last month. “It’s not hard to develop ricin.???
And here is the problem of relying on an expert who may know everything about fighting terrorism but who knows nothing about advanced chemistry or biology.
Ricin is not easy to “develop” unless, in using that word, you mean “grinding castor seeds into powder.”
And that is what people fiddling with castor seeds, in large quantities or small, always do. They transform seeds into castor mash. And the mash may be subsequently washed with an organic solvent, like acetone, to remove castor oil.
None of this is a purification. It is merely a change from seed to powder, and a bit of oil removal.
Back to the Times:
In 2003, British and French operatives broke up suspected al Qaeda cells that possessed components and manuals for ricin bombs …
This is also wrong.
The London ricin plot was not connected to al Qaeda. It was one man — Kamel Bourgass — who was sent over for it. No manuals or components for ricin bombs were recovered.
I have translations of the papers seized in the British “ricin ring” raids.
These are not manuals. They are elementary scraps of paper. Rubbish, really.
In London, the plot was to smear ricin (castor powder, really) mixed with skin creme on door handles. No bomb. In any case, an expert testified that ricin wasn’t a contact poison, anyway.
Martin Pearce, the Porton Down scientist who accompanied the anti-terrorism team on the Wood Green raid noted items of potential interest to include, toiletries, a common funnel, two scales, bottles of acetone and some rubber gloves.
Twenty-two intact castor seeds were recovered. Twenty-one were found in a jewelry case along with one other in an unspecified location within the Wood Green apartment.
Furthermore:
Months earlier and behind the scenes, the British government had seen its claims, that the group [of men eventually found innocent in a jury trial] had the capability to produce ricin and that materials on a ricin recipe found in their belongings could be linked to al Qaida, rupture. And equally startling, it was confirmed that a preliminary positive finding of the poison in a residue tested in a raid on their apartment in Wood Green in January of 2003 was false but that through bureaucratic bungling, just the opposite news was presented to British authorities.
Near the end the Times reporters write:
Months after the initial ricin intelligence reports surfaced last year, Saudi intelligence officials revealed a twist to the ricin plot: Qaeda operatives were trying to place the toxin in bottles of perfume, especially a popular local fragrance made of the resin of agarwood, and send those bottles as gifts to assassinate government officials and law enforcement and military officers. There is no indication that Al Qaeda ever succeeded with this approach, intelligence officials said.
Even this idea is old news.
My crude drawing, from years ago, is a copy of how American survivalist Kurt Saxon proposed that ricin might be used from one of his old pamphlets published in the Eighties.
The illustration to the left, for example, is Dick Destiny blog’s rendition of a drawing of what to do with your bowl of ricin poison, published in Kurt Saxon’s “The Weaponeer” in 1984.
It is no surprise that al Qaeda has an abiding interest in ricin. The “recipe” for turning to castor seeds into dry powder is easy to come by. And there has never been any shortage of US government men and mountebank counter-terror “experts” saying that it’s easy to make.
But history has shown quite the opposite. Ricin is far from easy to make into a weapon, much less any notional bomb. It can be used and has been used as a poison aimed at one person, sometimes in a household, or more famously from a Cold War example I won’t bother to mention.
And every year the FBI arrests a share of white American kooks who are puttering around with castor seeds.
So it is quite logical that al Qaeda might wish to try and do something using it. And, through the war on terror, some of them have always believed, too, that ricin is easy to make into a weapon.
Why?
Because they have frequently read that this is so in the American press.
The New York Times article has one takeaway which is not a mistake. The US counter-terror man asserts that any “ricin bomb” would most certainly “scare” people and be very big news.
That’s very accurate, unfortunately. It makes it possible for them to make a “ricin bomb” that doesn’t actually work, although the immediate explosion would, by itself, kill people close by.
Once news got going that a “ricin bomb” had been deployed anyone even remotely near the thing would probably be terrified they’d been poisoned. The American media would be the vector for this whether anyone had actually been poisoned or not.
The President, in his Saturday speech, incapable or unwilling to simply utter truth — that it is the GOP/Tea Party that drove the country to the brink of default, the party that has refused to let anything be done in its aim to destroy him and the middle class:
On Thursday, I visited a new, high-tech factory in Michigan where workers are helping America lead the way in a growing clean energy industry.
They were proud of their work, and they should be. They’re not just showing us a path out of the worst recession in generations–they’re proving that this is still a country where we make things; where new ideas take root and grow; where the best universities, most creative entrepreneurs, and most dynamic businesses in the world call home. They’re proving that even in difficult times, there’s not a country on Earth that wouldn’t trade places with us.
That doesn’t mean we don’t face some very tough economic challenges. Many Americans are hurting badly right now. Many have been unemployed for too long. Putting these men and women back to work, and growing wages for everyone, has got to be our top priority.
But lately, the response from Washington has been partisanship and gridlock that’s only undermined public confidence and hindered our efforts to grow the economy.
So while there’s nothing wrong with our country, there is something wrong with our politics, and that’s what we’ve got to fix. Because we know there are things Congress can do, right now, to get more money back in your pockets, get this economy growing faster, and get our friends and neighbors back to work.
The payroll tax cut that put $1,000 back in the average family’s pocket this year? Let’s extend it. Construction workers who’ve been jobless since the housing boom went bust? Let’s put them back to work rebuilding America. Let’s cut red tape in the patent process so entrepreneurs can get good ideas to market more quickly. Let’s finish trade deals so we can sell more American-made goods around the world. Let’s connect the hundreds of thousands of brave Americans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan to businesses that need their incredible skills and talents.
These are all things we can do right now. So let’s do them. And over the coming weeks, I’ll put forward more proposals to help our businesses hire and create jobs, and won’t stop until every American who wants a job can find one.
But we can no longer let partisan brinksmanship get in our way–the idea that making it through the next election is more important than making things right. That’s what’s holding us back–the fact that some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.
So you’ve got a right to be frustrated. I am. Because you deserve better. And I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.
Members of Congress are at home in their districts right now. And if you agree with me–whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or not much of a fan of either–let them know.
If you’ve had it with gridlock, and you want them to pass stalled bills that will help our economy right now–let them know.
If you refuse to settle for a politics where scoring points is more important than solving problems; if you believe it’s time to put country before party and the interests of our children before our own–let them know.
And maybe they’ll get back to Washington ready to compromise, ready to create jobs, ready to get our fiscal house in order–ready to do what you sent them to do.
Yes, we’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it. That’s a hard truth–but it’s no excuse for inaction. After all, America voted for divided government, not dysfunctional government, and we’ve got work to do. And when we come together and find common ground, there’s no stopping this country. There’s no stopping our people. There’s no holding us back. And there is every reason to believe we’ll get through this storm to a brighter day.
I thought MSNBC’s work in Wisconsin on Tuesday night wildly inappropriate. They front loaded the news and were burned to a crisp.
Between Ed Schulz and Rachel Maddow, the network had built up the Wisconsin recalls as a huge victory, a raising the flag on Iwo Jima moment, a big strike back against the other side.
What they got was the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge.
Specifically, the big movie starring Richard Shaw, Henry Fonda, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and a bunch of other name stars.
Shot in Spain, it was one of those big production movies so badly done it’s silly. Which, coincidentally, is unfortunately typical of premature Dem proclamations of victory.
By the end of the Bulge the climactic panzer battle looks like it’s taking place on a hot desert plain, not the forests of the Ardennes in the dead of winter.
“How did we get to el Alamein?” someone should have asked in post production.
Still, the Battle of the Bulge is something of a tragi-comedic show of fanaticism and delusion.
Richard Shaw plays Hessler, the ramrod steely German miraculous panzer leader, brought back for a last campaign, one to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He gets carried away by the new Tiger tanks he’s been given (in the movie they’re old crap Pattons we sold to Spain in the 50’s and 60’s) and a group of young soldiers singing “Das Panzerlied.”
Pick the one — uploaded by “arddel.” The sound is exquisite. Can you recognize the actor who would get a bigger role in “Where Eagles Dare”?
(It comes at 1:49.)
Behind those singing soldiers is a big banner: “Der Sieg wird unser sein.”
“The victory will be ours.”
Another banner reads: “Glauben. Kampfen. Siegen.”
“Believe! Fight! Win!”
Win the fucking future.
Hessler orders his skeptical orderly, a much older soldier who has been through all the campaigns, to sing. The man does so but you can see in his eyes he know it’s rot. What was once great now just isn’t good enough.
And to my mind it’s a good metaphor for our leaders. It was Ed Schulz in Wisconsin.
It’s Barack Obama when he went onstage yesterday at some measly battery plant in Michigan, choosing not to seriously discuss any of the problems that need fixing.
Everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault he can’t do anything. But he just can’t bring himself to speak it. Instead, another exhortation — onward to victory, the equivalent of singing a song — from the local bunker.
(Between two states, the place employed 150 people! Bethlehem Steel, even in major decline in the mid-Eighties when I lived near it, dwarfed the place.)
And, of course, the delusion applies in extremity to all the wild-eyed crazies in the GOP, virtually the entire party.
None of our leaders can bring themselves to admit what the old geezers standing behind them know, those who can be ordered to sing and go along but who do so only reluctantly.
Like in the movie, the country’s best now is not going to be good enough. Not by a long shot.
“Pivoting to jobs” and making speeches at piss ant firms found by the advance team using Google for a few minutes won’t fix it. Budget cutting and deficit chopping and clapping your hands in glee when the government is downsized and more people are put out of work certainly won’t.
There are answers but fanaticism and delusion make them unreachable and unspeakable to the people in power.
At the end of Bulge everything has gone to hell for Hessler. The battle is lost but he’s trying to force the last panzer up the hill as barrels of fuel incinerate him. The Panzerlied can be heard in the background. (Here.)
His aide, the old man, walks back to what’s left of Germany.
That’s us. No Marshall Plan or anything else, awaits, though. Just more of the same.
The band members [of Sidewinder] did not expect it either. Staff Sgt. Angie Johnson, of the 571st Air Force Band, 131st Bomb Wing, Air National Guard, only found out about the viral video when Carson Daly contacted her on Twitter. In short order, Mark Burnett and NBC’s the Voice reached out as well. “ Totally can’t believe I’m tweeting with you right now. Jaw.On.Floor,??? Johnson wrote.
I can believe it. The band has an incredible sound on par with the original songstress Adele. Watch it.
Eh. Not quite. The singer is indeed very good. The rest of the band? Not so much.
And if you look hard you can probably find an act in your hometown just as accomplished. That means — in quite a few places. Learnt it as a music journalist many years ago.
No link straight to YouTube. It’s easy enough to find, having been linked by every major media organization.
Go to the WaPo and read the gush. The video is embedded on the page.
Part of our new normalcy is the collective backdoor guilt shared by most of the country.
Which, of course, has not participated in the decade long wars.
And while that’s the way our leaders and the Pentagon set it up, when they removed our responsibility they also took a piece of everyone’s soul as payment.
So whenever something comes over the wire now, discovered to be from the young people in camo, the overcompensation squeezes out. Overcompensation as balm for the hole where a piece of the soul was surgically removed years ago.
Honor the soldiers in whatever they do.
No discouraging words please.
I’m tired of it. So call me an asshole if you must, it’s been done many times.
Go on American Idol or America’s Got Talent or The Voice or whatever, already. Just like the hundreds you see in the auditions, all of them pretty good, even though they never make it to the season.
Broken by The Daily Beast, Clarke granted an interview for some 9/11 tenth anniversary radio documentary, one in which he avers the CIA “intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.”
The rationale: They were trying to “recruit” the al Qaeda men living in southern California as informants.
The decision to do the alleged cover-up was made by George Tenet, it reads.
The Beast shoots itself and Clarke in the foot a bit, mentioning way down in the story that the interview in which ol’ RC dropped this bomb was back in 2009.
The question arises: If this is so important why have we had to wait two years to just before the big tenth anniversary outpour on 9/11 to find out?
The answer is fairly obvious. Show business. It’s not really important whether it’s true. It’s just important it achieve maximum impact in the media for the benefit of the radio show’s producers.
Clarke became a hero — if that’s what you want to call it — for his 2004 book, “Against All Enemies, [and] testimony on Capitol Hill about the Bush administration’s alleged absence of diligence in the war on terrorism.”
All of this, and 60 Minutes, made Clarke the darling of Democrats who thought, for sure, he would help bring down George W. Bush.
My brief experience with the frivolity is documented here, in a cover story at the Village Voice entitled I, Vermin from Under Rock.
It made Clarke a fortune in book contracts, magazine articles and consulting/speaking fees.
But the Democrats were thrown to the dogs in the Presidential election, anyway.
A radio documentary isn’t nearly as big a deal — although — if the story is repeated enough, it might become one.
Clarke’s last book was on cyberwar and while it gets its mentions on that beat it’s trivial business compared to the daily news of despair, national paralysis, economic collapse and mass unemployment.
But 9/11 outrage timed right for the anniversary media splurge, now that’s an entirely different kettle of fish. There will be many many people who dearly want to believe in another story of cover-up and betrayal.
Wouldn’t it be nice to make another pass through the rotunda again with renewed book contract?
So where is the bin Laden dividend? Besides a week of celebration, the granting of access to the superdog on the trip — Cairo, and a story I declined to read in the New Yorker because it had been summarized so well everywhere else? Where did it go?
To Hollywood, of course. But you knew that [would happen.]
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says he’s worried that the Obama administration will only be too happy to give sensitive details about the Navy SEAL mission to the Oscar-winning moviemakers behind the project.
White House spokesman Jay Carney suggests that King should have better things to do than complain about a movie.
King on Wednesday sought an investigation by the CIA and Pentagon inspectors general, wanting them to review the administration’s cooperation with director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal…
Peter King is regularly poison. But I’m going to side with him on this one, just for spite because this movie, if it becomes a hit, is just what the White House wants prior to the election.
The president really needs to be getting on with things, not giving leaks to Hollywood for the sake of a Patton-esque movie moment.
