October 30, 2010, October surprise
I know I'm supposed to be scared s***less about today's official thing-I'm-supposed-to-be-incredibly-afraid-of, be it incompetent would-be terrorists trying to blow up their underpants on airplanes, or blow up Times Square, or mailing explosive packages from Yemen... to synagogues in Chicago.
Thing is... I've seen this movie... the last-minute-before-the-election "surprise" of some kind of "terror thing." The Bush Administration used it beautifully, and Republicans magically got elected. The Obama Administration, it seems, appears to be using it for the identical purpose (that would be getting Republicans elected in this mid-term election).
Naturally, without any "evidence" besides its own say-so (and we're supposed to "trust it" with respect to everything else), we are told that the perpetrator of this is "radical cleric" Emmanuel Goldstein Lex Luthor Anwar al-Awlaki. Not to worry your pretty little heads, all you "security moms"... al-Awlaki has been "marked for death" by those patriotic killers at the CIA. Thing is... he's never been convicted of anything... or even tried... or even charged. He's just been marked for death because the Government says so Oh... I think I should mention that Mr. al-Awlaki is a United States citizen. The Fifth Amendment to our Constitution... that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law...?
I guess the Government's response to that would be... "surprise"!
The other thing I'd like to throw out there is that the [we are told] targeting of synagogues in Chicago [where former White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel, himself a Jew of Israeli background... is running for mayor... coincidence?]... comes within days, if not hours, of Omar Khadr's pre-composed-by-the-government guilty plea that includes his confession that in addition to wanting to do battle against and kill Americans, he also wanted to kill Jews.
Maybe it's all just... a coincidence... that our nemeses at the new-and-decentralized al-Qaeda, in the Arabian peninsula, or wherever, are changing their M.O. to unibomber style mail bombs... to synagogues... in Chicago... and it just happens that we catch them a few days before a federal election... or maybe it's... something else. Like a government in need of a public justification for a step-up in the dictatorial powers it is taking on for itself... just as it is about to go into full-time Presidential reelection mode [that would be the day after the mid-terms, btw], the last thing it wants to be reminded of is that Barack Obama campaigned against the totalitarianism of the Bush-Cheney Administration's executive excesses... and that not only is it not reversing the dictatorial arc the country was on, but, in its policies on state secrets, eavesdropping, accelerating the wars, and programs to liquidate enemies of the state... it is going way beyond where the Bush-Cheney Administration ever dreamed of, and worse, proposes to institutionalize this with legislation and court precedents and the like.
I guess the Government's response to all that would be... "surprise"!