Spinning Terror

If you want a good look at the one-note Administration we have in President Bush, just watch over the next few days as today’s foiled terrorist plot in Great Britain unfolds.

For those who haven't been paying attention to the news (and being on vacation, I haven't been until my parents called to tell me of their travails in flying coast-to-coast this morning for a wedding), British authorities arrested 24 men whom they say were poised to blow up as many as twenty England-to-America airline flights today.

I’m inclined to believe that this story is accurate, unlike some of the recent "leaks" of "foiled plots" which generally show up when the Administration badly needs to try to turn around its poll numbers and usually turn out to have been some group of small time losers who couldn’t find their butts with both hands, no closer to actually carrying out an act of terrorism than I am to building a full scale version of the Titanic using only cheerios and peanut butter.

But you watch the results now. Over the next few days, this "rule through fear" administration is going to point to this as though it is some kind of referendum on their own leadership. In as much as I can't make my brain work like Karl Rove’s (nor would I want to), I'm not sure which tactic or combination there of they will take, but it will be some combination of these:

1. Try to conflate some of the credit for foiling the plot onto the Administration’s leadership, ignoring the fact that it was entirely a British operation.
2. Point to this and claim that it proves that there are still enemies out there who want to attack us, which is true but proceeds from the false premise that Administration opponents and everyone else has forgotten this fact.
3. Use this event to further justify their erosion of our civil liberties, as though their own inability to do the job playing under the rules this country was founded upon justifies their taking our rights, instead of justifying finding a new Administration that can do its job AND maintain our rights.

The fact is, this war on terrorism is all they've got. They can't point to their record on civil liberties, clearly. They can only point to their record on the economy if they compare today to the low point of their administration (as opposed to comparing to when they took office). The majority of Americans recognize that they've bent over backwards to line the pockets of the richest 1% and major corporations like Haliburton and Exxon/Mobil while refusing even the barest minimum cost of living adjustments to the minimum wage.

But the fact is, this single issue drum which they keep beating rings pretty hollow, it is merely politicizing the events of September 11, 2001. The best they can truly claim is that 9/11 would have happened no matter who was President (which is very likely true), and that they've done their best (as any President would have) to protect the country from future attacks. That there have been no more large scale attacks is no ringing endorsement of their leadership, since there were 8 years between the 1993 WTC bombing (the last major attack by al Qaeda on U.S. soil) and 9/11. It could just point to the length of time it takes to properly plan and gather resources for an operation like this. And heaven forbid there IS another attack, while they're busily spinning how this shows that we need them and their policies, we should all recognize that another attack is simply another failure on their part. Only in American politics can someone drop a package they’re delivering and then try to claim that that just proves that their own delivery service should be used, because gravity is always out there, always plotting, and only they have the tools to fight it.

But I've gotten off track. My point here is to get people to think. As you watch the news coverage of the foiled plot and the reactions to it, think about the claims being made by anyone and everyone, but particularly by the Administration and their apologists. See how many of them actually ring true, and how many are not truly supported by the facts, or are attempts to take the truth of the situation and extend it beyond reason to assert claims for political gain.

Liam.

P.S. I said I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that 9/11 would still have happened no matter who had been President, and I am, but I want to point out that there is even some reason to suspect that this may not be true. I'm inclined to believe that as a society we'd become so complacent that it was inevitable, but there is quite a bit of evidence that this Administration was given reasonable warnings, both about this particular plot and about al Qaeda in the first months of their time in office and did nothing about it. So while I'm willing to give that benefit of the doubt, I also recognize that I am doing so, and that it's entirely possible that, given a President more on the ball from the start, the 9/11 plot may have been foiled from the start, in much the same way today's was.