September 11, 2014, Depends on what the meaning of Is Is... er, ISIS
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Did the President's Big Speech [TM] threatening to kick ass and take names re: "the Islamic State[TM]" bring back that awesome 9-11 spirit? Because Paranoia Is Patriotic [TM].
It's That Day [TM] all over again. Just forty-one years ago on 11 September, a CIA-sponsored coup d'etat military junta that the United States was happy about toppled the democratically elected government of Chile and then murdered that nation's rightful president Salvador Allende President Salvador Allende committed suicide.
And, of course, it is just two years after Benghazi [TM].
In case you're wondering just what these seemingly disparate (or not so disparate) events have in common, they are all what happens when the empire bites off just a little more than it can chew, and the costs of maintaining garrisons in over 140 countries finally exceed the value of sucking those over 140 countries dry-- a point we may not have reached at the time we engineered the overthrow of Allende, but have certainly reached now-- and as such, the empire starts to reap the seeds of its own destruction that are intrinsic to it being an empire.
Yes, it's only been thirteen years since the ultimate Rube Goldberg-esque combination of clusterf***s imaginable (for those convinced the whole thing was some kind of inside job-- to you, I ask, do you really attribute that level of competence to the people to whom you are attributing it?) Then again, maybe not so fast... please feel free to look at my own more contemporaneous take, called "Let's roll: alternative version.." Whatever actually transpired (as opposed to what we are told transpired), the events just thirteen years ago today have been consistently used to justify the necessary internal crackdown on the rubes in the imperial mother country which we have been enjoying these last thirteen years. Yes, a few irregulars mostly from Saudi-- the principal energy supplier of the empire-- caused a great deal of trouble, and set quite a few things in motion that, in a political vacuum, appear to still be in motion.
Even now, polling shows that, while Americans have no faith in their President, they still want him to blow sh*t up (as long as its foreign).
In short, game, set, match: democracies are about reasoned discourse, and tyrannies are about appeals to raw emotion. Which one are we about? Don't answer that.
Thirteen does not appear to be the charm re: this 9-11 thing. I have no grand insights. And if I did, they would be lost on Americans anyway, it would seem.