Saturday, December 26, 2009

The sky is falling -- well, almost.

When I heard about the failed attempt to blow up an airplane yesterday, my first reaction was "how long will it take the Republicans to blame it on the President and/or Liberals. Congressman Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, as if he'd read my mind, stepped right up to the plate with
“People have got to start connecting the dots here and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration.”
Of course he has no way of knowing exactly or even generally what is known by the President, his advisers, the NSA or anyone else for that matter, but by implying that something is obvious and Obama has been oblivious, he wins another point in the fantasy touch football game of insinuational politics. Of course by some rule of the game I've never understood, it's still off-limits to insinuate that the George W. Bush administration ignored the idea that Terrorists could use airplanes and followed some imaginary, if not fraudulent dots straight to Baghdad.

Hoekstra, or Hokey, if you prefer went straight to Twitter and implied to whatever birds of that feather read his bird brained utterances, that the Obama administration had made some sort of outrageous solecism worthy only of an incompetent and coward by calling a failed attempt a failed attempt, which, of course it was.
"Administration says attempted terrorist attack. No. It was a terrorist attack! Just not as successful as they (AQ) planned." tweeted our friend Hokey.
A white House spokesman had been quoted by AP as saying
"We believe this was an attempted act of terrorism."
By that logic, I'd have to say that my tossing a rock in a northerly direction is an actual attack on Atlanta, the importance of which is undiminished by Atlanta being some 500 miles away and my throwing arm no longer what it was.

I'm guessing with some confidence that the correct course of action would, according to Hokey, be to run down Pennsylvania Avenue shrieking "terrorist attack -- terrorist attack" because the panic factor has proved to work in the Republicans' favor often enough to warrant another try.

Unfortunately the determination as to whether we've indeed suffered an official terrorist attack is the job of the Attorney General who may have wanted to take more than 5 minutes to look into the sketchy and ever changing reports coming in from Detroit as to who did it, what was done and with what kind of device.

Of course I continue to assert that if the Republicans can do no more than sift and comb through ever word, action or inaction of the opposition for something that can be twisted, misrepresented or edited into a scandal they can use to bash Obama, they continue to be the worst enemy we have.

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