Jan. 8, 2010

In case you haven’t heard, a guy named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab aimed to blow up his underwear during a commercial airline flight the other day, and I don’t mean he whipped off his Jockeys and desperately tried to inflate them while the attendant was busy handing out pretzels. Umar had some A-1 explosives nestled against his radical testicles and was intent on blasting both his testicles and the other passengers onboard the plane into their chosen afterlives, regardless of whether they’ve been conditioned to expect hot-blooded virgins or harpists with great big wings sitting on cotton candy clouds once they get there.

The Department of Homeland Security straight-up dropped the ball on Abdulmutallab, oh, about 13 different times during the buildup to his Big Moment, so he had to be tackled by passengers in mid-fuse-lighting. And that pisses me off. I couldn’t begin to tell you which heads need to roll, since the channels of command for this sort of thing sprout off in myriad directions.

It’s obvious, though, that there were Homeland Security employees along the line who didn’t take several warnings about lonely little Umar particularly seriously, and they should pay for it with their jobs. They screwed up, and people almost died for their incompetence, so they deserve what they get.

Unfortunately, we’re now getting a very unique perspective on who can accurately be viewed as a screw-up when it comes to terrorism, and the TV news networks are more than happy to broadcast the scoop. It turns out, you see, that George W. Bush isn’t a terrorism screw-up. And Barack Obama quite clearly is.

Check out the following couple of clips. The first one features Mississippi’s exceptionally clear-eyed Gov. Haley Barbour speaking to some bobblehead at Fox News, while the second one features the heroically delusional Rudy Giuliani, who’s prosthelytizing to an unseen George Stephanopoulos on that ABC Morning thing that I never watch.

I’m about to say something now that may come as a surprise, so you better sit down— the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 occurred while George W. Bush was in office! He could have read about the clear possibility of such an event occurring on his watch had he felt a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” seemed important enough to peruse.

I'm just guessing, but I assume Bush would have especially enjoyed the passage about commercial airliners possibly getting hijacked and used as missiles. Oh! I almost forgot— that “shoe bomber” also pulled his little prank while Bush was in the White House. And remember all those letters full of anthrax? Well, Bush does, too. Because they were mailed while he was the President of the United States.

But that's just three instances. When you're properly conservative, "three" is nothing more than a synonym for "zero."

                                                ***

I had a prime vantage point for the deadly theatrics on Sept. 11th. I was clinging to a ladder on the water tower atop my apartment building, gazing in utter disbelief at the gaping hole in the north tower of the World Trade Center. This horrific event unfolded in the place where I live— the place where I met and fell in love with my wife, and where I found my voice as a writer. And, one blue-skied morning, 3,000 of my neighbors where slaughtered there, by a group of murderers who decided to shout above the din of a bulldozing world power.

The game, however you wanted to define it, was now on. After Sept. 11th, America, which, as we all know, never kills anybody, suddenly had to fight for control of the ball.

So, before anybody starts calling me a blinders-wearing lefty, understand that I was rattled to the core by what happened that day, and can still pull the sulfur smell of the collapsed towers from my memory if I want to. The firehouse in my old neighborhood has the names of 16 men who died in the towers painted on a memorial wall; the station in my current neighborhood holds 13 names. Try casually walking past that when you’re going to the grocery store. I wouldn't care if my parents were responsible for ignoring bold-print warning signs. I'd want the people who did nothing to try to stop it from happening to get due credit.

If you’re a New Yorker, then, and experienced Sept. 11th first-hand, you have every reason to be infuriated when “public servants” use the media to launch their personal agendas and spin the truth about the attacks - even the kind of truth that unfolds on national TV and involves thousands of disintegrated bodies - into an ugly, self-serving veil of unadulterated bullshit. It’s nothing short of shameful to do so, but if any concept bit the dust when those planes hit the buildings, it was shame, and our 24-hour news monster has played along for almost 10 years now like a patsy.

Forget Fox News, which, of course, broadcasts direct from a sewer in a far-flung suburb of mouth-breathing dreamland. The view, as put forth in the clip, that innocent people being murdered in countries besides the U.S. is just fine, because the real folks here in the Land of the Free are still "safe" is, by now, an old Fox standby. Instead, let’s examine George Fucking Stephanopoulos, who sat there silently while Giuliani made like someone’s ill-informed granny.

Is it really beyond the realm of Stephanopoulos’ position as a political news commentator to interject with, “Um, what you’re saying has absolutely no basis in reality?” Has it truly become the policy of our news networks to have reporters nod grimly, regardless of what’s being said to them?

I don’t know how Stephanopoulos could have listened to Giuliani's casual nonsense as a human being, let alone as an employee of ABC News. Surely to God he understands the significance of turning the victims of the 9-11 attacks into mere tools in the ongoing Republican contest to reshape Barack Obama as a deluded, lazy, inexplicably anti-American asshole.

Obama has been a considerable disappointment to me since he took office; at this point, I’m hardly what you would call a steadfast Obama-ite. But the idea that he doesn’t understand the importance of stopping terrorist attacks, or - and I’ve already seen this several times on TV - views terrorism as somehow unlikely to happen, is so ludicrous anyone who suggests otherwise should be told to pack up his or her mouth and leave the TV studio.

Government employees who are supposed to catch terrorists blew it this time, just like they’ve blown it before, and steps will now be taken to try to correct such oversights. And those steps won’t be taken because Barack Obama doesn’t grasp the concept of terrorism. Buckle down, though, because the Republican mouth-trust will be spewing this strain of idiocy for months to come. If the past election, and the current health care reform debate, proves anything, it's that nothing galvanizes hardcore conservatives like a shared idiotic dream.

As for Stephanopoulos, if he views his prime objective at ABC as being a mere disseminator of information, regardless of whether or not that “information” is self-serving fantasy, he needs to write a rinky-dink theme song and get himself a fucking children’s show. Just don’t dress up like a purple dinosaur, George. Somebody’s already doing that.

Paul Tatara