Gene Lyons on political illusion

[mooseandsquirrel]

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How big a threat is bin Laden to what Cowboy W. calls “the Amurkin way-alife” anyway ? Let’s get real : Al-Qa’ida has no army, no navy, no air force, no means of conducting an effective military strike against the U. S. mainland. What it can do, all it can do, is stage huge, theatrical atrocities like 9 / 11 and last year’s London subway bombings. For those atrocities, they should be hunted down like the murderous lunatics they are.

But al-Qa’ida is not a threat to the integrity of these United States or its constitutional government. Historian Joseph Ellis recently made that point in a New York Times column.

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http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/gene.html

[Demeter]

1. And not all that Frequently Either

Furthermore, atrocities have been foiled with just a little normal security--no massive invasions of privacy needed (or reading a few reports in a timely manner).

[Martin Eden]

2. Bush is al Qaeda's ally

The purpose of terrorism is to induce irrational, disabling fear. In this sense, comments the brilliant blogger Digby at digbysblog. blogspot. com, “Al Qaeda has a powerful ally... the Bush administration, which for four years has... worked ceaselessly to instill in Americans an overarching and excessive fear of terrorism.”

But are we truly terrified by the bogeyman under Bush’s bed ? Digby thinks not. We’re more like teen-agers watching a horror movie, psychologically amped, but as spectators, not participants. Ghastly and horrifying as 9 / 11 was, he writes, “there was a sense of spectacle and drama about it that was literally unreal to those of us who watched it on television. This was fear put to music, with dramatic title treatments and a soaring voice-over.” Constantly invoking that fear, Bush has turned bin Laden into a political asset—evil incarnate, Satan in a turban. That’s one reason the president remains so popular in the Deep South, where fundamentalist black / white thinking and a taste for authoritarianism run strong. But it’s worse than useless against the actual threat. Granting the president king-like powers to spy on anybody he chooses not only diminishes our own freedoms, it simply doesn’t work. FBI and CIA agents complain of being flooded with a tsunami of useless information they can’t even translate, much less use. Real investigations grow narrower, not wider, as they proceed. Meanwhile, such tactics as torture, kidnapping combatants’ wives and firing missiles from pilotless drones into Pakistani villages don’t make terrorists fear us. They merely drag us down to their level, eroding America’s moral authority while sowing rage like dragon’s teeth.

Great column, thanks for posting!

K&R