Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Terrorists everywhere...

As I was listening to the State of the Union address I had some thoughts when the president talked about the terrorist plots we had supposedly stopped in the past four years. The plots he mentioned are listed here, in italics, with my thoughts at the time regarding each. I am, in each case, quoting Bush very loosely.

We stopped a plot to fly an airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.

Right. Apparently you don’t want to mistakenly call it the Liberty Tower again. I rather thought that the Library Tower plot had been debunked as pretty nebulous at best.

We stopped a group of Southeast Asians who were planning to strike within the United States.

Wow. I don’t remember hearing anything about that one. Oh wait, the Library Tower airplane plot was Southeast Asian, but…

We apprehended an Al Queda group developing Anthrax to strike within the United States.

I didn’t think the source of the Anthrax letters had ever been determined.

And the British stopped a group that was planning to blow up airliners headed for America over the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, that plot was pretty thin, and what’s this "we" crap? It was the British, and as I recall, we actually interfered with them.

Well, according to Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I was being generous. According to his report on Tuesday:

We stopped a plot to fly an airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.

My wife and I are planning a sea cruise through the Greek Islands. We do not yet have passports. We have not yet started saving any money pursuant to that purpose. We have no idea which islands we would want to see. In fact we don’t really know precisely where the damned things are except that I’m pretty sure they are in the Mediterranean. We’re hoping to do this sometime before ships are rendered obsolete by space travel. And my wife gets seasick standing on the dock.

Turns out the Library Tower airplane smackdown plot was at pretty much the same stage as our Greek Island sea cruise.

We stopped a group of Southeast Asians who were planning to strike within the United States.

Not only have I not heard of this plot, apparently neither has anyone else. Other than, perhaps, George Bush. Unless, as KO so neatly put it, “You have shown us the same baby twice and told us it was twins.”

We apprehended an Al Queda group developing Anthrax to strike within the United States.

Wow. Another one that seems to exist only in the vivid imagination of George W. Bush.

And the British stopped a group that was planning to blow up airliners headed for America over the Atlantic Ocean.

KO remembers this one much as I do; a plot advanced barely beyond the Greek Islands cruise described earlier. Plotters without passports, tickets, or even airline schedules, planning to blow up airplanes with technology that does not actually exist.

I’m surprised that Bush did not brag about the other notable successes of the indomitable DHS. Like the guys in Miami who were going to destroy the Sears Tower using combat boots, or the other guys who were going to blow up the Mackinac Bridge using cell phones, or the guys who thought Wall Street could be flooded because it was in “lower” Manhattan. Certainly grateful to our intrepid agents for stopping those dangerous malefactors in their tracks.

But to return to what our president did say. Why does he do this crap? Is he so detached from reality that he does not know what he is saying? Does he know that he is lying like a rug but thinks we are so stupid that we will not notice? I’m actually sort of past getting angry, I’m now more just baffled. The must deluded, lying sicko I have ever personally known has had a better grip on reality than to be so transparently dishonest.

Oh man. Two more long years of this.

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