July 14, 2016, Bastille Day Bad Stuff
Perhaps adding another page to the terrorist play book, a truck driver in Nice, France piled through a crowd until he managed to kill at least 75, with at least another 100 injured, during the aftermath of fireworks to celebrate the annual Bastille Day holiday. One assumes that the Islamic State/ISIL/ISIS/whatever it's called in French will soon be identified as responsible, with calls for increased assaults against that group in Syria notwithstanding that so much progress has been made in rolling it back that even Russian-American cooperation in Syria is possible (or, at least, Sec. of State Kerry is in Moscow trying to cooperate with Putin to some degree). Even the Donald has postponed his supposedly expected announcement of President of the He-Man Woman Haters Club Indiana Chapter Indiana Governor Mike Pence to be his running mate. Even as polls show that her elite immunity may have saved Hillary Clinton from prosecution for electronic security lapses, but not necessarily from severe political fallout.
Obviously, France has suffered the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the attacks last November that killed around 100 centered on the Bataclan nightclub, and now this. And, in turn, Belgium recently suffered horrifying assaults at its airport and a train station. Here, in the United States, we attributed the San Bernardino shootings (really, just one of numerous mass shooting incidents here) to the Islamic State (even though there was no evidence of anything other than "sympathizing" on the part of the alleged perpetrators, who were conveniently executed before being able to talk... kind of like what happened to Micah Xavier Johnson, alleged killer of at least five police officers in Dallas, who was executed by domestic police drone (an exploding robot, actually), and hence, conveniently, unable to talk.) I'm not even going to talk about horrifying recent events in Istanbul, Bangladesh, Baghdad and God knows where else. Nor will we talk about the European soccer championship, stolen from host France by Portugal.
So much going on... so little known, and I'm reasonably sure, so little will be known. I assume the killer's passport or i.d. or whatever will be conveniently found somewhere, and the place raided, and the usual suspects rounded up. Query whether France-- already under a state of emergency following the (multiple) Paris attacks, will step things up in any manner (such as, oh, their own version of a "Frexit," perhaps, as if the perps came through a "borderless Europe," maybe it's time they re-think the whole thing... just saying...)
So much bad stuff going on... Obviously, the premise of going to war with pretty much everyone in the Middle East... hasn't gone so well... even France, once derided as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for not backing he-man Dubya in his holy war against Islam war against Iraq-- the war that gave us the Islamic State in the midst of the power vaccum that Dubya caused in Iraq (and Barack hasn't helped much by seamlessly continuing Dubya's wars and policies)... now seems to be front and center as a terror target...
What can one even say?