"If You Go Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao...."

 

I get it, I think. There's a handful of them in every radical crowd. They're so hip, they're positively pelvic. If you're offended by their t-shirt, the problem is you, etc. And nonetheless, the young folks who have discovered Bin Laden's "Letter to America" are just so disappointing. I always hoped, somewhere out there, that, having grown up with the internet, some kind of extra media-savvy would rub off on them, and they would understand that there is propaganda, everywhere, and just because you've run into something "new to you" doesn't mean it's actually valid. That the youths would seek context.

This is called, me, being overly optimistic about human nature. Also, too, I know a bunch of elderly "leftists" who are likewise suckers for the same sort of thing. 

Bin Laden was a recruiter for terrorism against the US--he peddled horseshit pills for what ailed the world. Lots of bloody-minded assholes do that. It's not special. 

I'm not going to be the one who waves my fist and yells at the kids to get off my lawn or stop making human chains or whatever they do today, even if for the love of the revolution, please consider why you are getting dragged off of private property and whether blocking doors are a fire hazard. And also too, be aware cops will wreck your property and get physical at pretty much any leftist protest--it isn't personal. 

But for the love of fuck, please try not to make actual monsters your fucking mascots--is that TOO MUCH to ask? 

Finally--yes, movements can be discredited by malicious actors from within. There were bad actors embedded in Occupy and BLM, and they are already down in your pod.  Don't be hoodwinked and bamboozled babies. It's a jungle out there. 

We Felt Our Mortality

 

We are a young country, the US, in some ways, and ride on the idea of our strength and sense of purpose as a leader among nations. The first country among equals (except we're not) as one might say "primus inter pares." The memorial logos, the sigils, the swag, often just show the World Trade Towers themselves, draped in flag-wrap. The buildings were not the tragedy--the loss of lives was.  We lost great people that day. We lost parents and children, leaders and caregivers, sinners and saints. All kinds of people. Office workers, police, firefighters, medics. 

But the pictures of the victims themselves is too haunting: and yet we see them, forever in our minds. And they get reposted on social media. 

We are losing them even today--people who inhaled too much of whatever makes buildings and are dying too young of what they breathed in. We are losing them even now, people who were there or their loved one was there and now it's 22 years out, and we lose people all the time. The narrative memory of what happened will fade. Except in what has been committed to print, video, etc.--but that memory is always a little short. 

Tragedies amortize. Tragedies fade. We said "Never again" but we don't step into the same river twice, or face the same sort of history as Memorex: just an echo. 

The Eternal Question: Lying or Stupid?

 

GOP Rep. McClain falsely claimed that Trump caught Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader was killed during the first Obama administration, when Trump was still hosting a game show. https://t.co/1urcAsB7S7

— Insider News (@InsiderNews) April 3, 2022

See, I want to believe that every adult American person alive in 2011 remembers that President Obama announced that there was a successful mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden. It would be really difficult for me to believe that Rep. McClain is anaware of this. It could be that she was thinking about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who she mentions an entire breath later, but whose name she couldn't come up with right away--but it's still inexcusable. It's also possible she entirely meant "inflation", not "unemployment", when she declared that unemployment was at a 40 year high (when it is actually at a 50 year low). 

But it's the old eternal question isn't it? Lying or Stupid. If it's a lie, it's terrible, and if it's sheer stupidity--yes that is also news. Why would we be ok with elected figures who are just dumb as hell about what are basically current events? And yet it seems like people accept a certain degree of lying from Republicans and are almost embarrassed to call them out as stupid.

I've mentioned just recently the problem we have with taking polls for how people feel about facts (they don't always agree with'em!) when some people are just contrarian or hopelessly misinformed. What does a poll mean when it shows that a high number of people are out of touch with actual facts? Like, for example--who won the 2020 presidential election? A good portion of the media doesn't see the problem of, say, people not understanding that Biden has been responsible for a jobs boom as a media problem, but as a "Democrats in disarray" problem.

Anyway--if Democrats are responsible for cleaning up the information mess, it's important to challenge the outright lying, and not making excuses for the stupidity of dissembling Republicans. I don't assume even GOP "mistakes" are honest. So rip them on the apparent lying, and make them look stupid back-pedaling. 

The October Surprise is We Made it to October

 

I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with information that some computer shop got hold of a hard drive that is from Hunter Biden and is now in the hands of maybe the FBI and also too Rudy Giuliani who is very strong on the cyber. (Like, this is a thing he took money from people to consult on, which is actually embarrassing.) 

So now that the Durham investigation and the "unmasking" thing are apparently duds, we're going to go back to the Ukraine well that got Trump impeached, huh? If that's where the guy holding superspreader events all over battleground states want to go, to advertise his alleged post-Covid-19 fitness while the pandemic still rages and while his actual unfitness for the job was determined well before he botched the pandemic response, well, ok. As for me, I spent the last nearly four years documenting TrumpWorld Grab Bags of the depth and depravity of this Administration, and this counts as the most desperate and fail-flail stuff I have ever seen from a pack of racist cretins and inveterate liars. 

Naturally, Biden has no record that such a meeting as is the focal point of the email allegation from the hard-drive "evidence" ever took place*--"but his emails" is just recycled 2016 hash, and I would adore to know what emails between Jared Kushner and MbS looked like. I don't want to hear about familial corruption from the Trump Administration/family, who are literally soaking in it. 

Trump is desperate for an October Surprise. He will try different things, some entirely stupid. But it's too late--remember how this whole year has gone? Yeah. That's him. That was his watch. He fucked everything up and is now looking for a lifeline. 

I am not even arsed to play this game anymore and chase down all the ways this shit is fake, because even if it was all 100% true, Trump fucked up everything. The economy is bad. The unemployment is bad. The COVID-19 deaths and infection rates are bad. The polarization and mistrust are bad. His relentless lying is bad, and getting worse, because his brain is bad. 

Even if Biden is flawed or his son is a wee bit of a money hungry fuckup--everything in TrumpWorld is worse than we deserve. And Biden is not that flawed. He has the unfakeable funk of a person who actually gives a damn about this country. Trump World's shitheaded rumor mongering shows he never has. 

*UPDATE: And as Steve M. notes, even if such a meeting did take place, it isn't a big deal--or wouldn't be unless you are already primed to knee-jerk assume there must be something wrong there. Long story short--this is for keeping Trump's rubens on the ranch, but it won't derail folks who already know well and good why they are Team Biden.

Strangely Blogged Cannot Fact Check Seymour Hersh

I have a pretty good estimation of my limitations as a blogger--I am not a journalist, and I am not a public intellectual. The best I can claim to be is a semi-anonymous weisenheimer. So, while I feel like some opinion of mine regarding Sy Hersh's assertions regarding the details of the raid on OBL's Abbottabad residence could have a limited use, the simple and obvious fact is, I don't have my hands on anything that says him "nay". But he isn't exactly presenting a story with a lot that says him "yea".

My resources are what they are. Given the location where OBL was holed up, it always seemed pretty plausible to me that Pakistan intelligence had to know where he was, but if so, I couldn't understand why he wasn't turned over before unless the Pakistani government found it very politically inconvenient to do so, on the general grounds that their folks wouldn't see OBL's capture or death in the same positive light that Americans would. There's no conspiracy afoot at all--just the Pakistan government not feeling like openly being the US's lackey in any kind of way. It's face-saving and ass-covering for them to play it like they never knew, and for the US to go ahead and stage a--what would you even call that? A wet extraction?

A Couple Anniversary Announcements

In passing, one should note that ten years ago, this happened:

And two years ago, this did:

So, there's those, and that's basically that.

Accidentally very Not Like a Martyr.

Maybe it's just me, but the ending of of Osama bin Laden's life has a certain tawdriness to it that satisfies the tendency I have to look for narratives. He sold terrorism to his followers, sending people to suicide deaths that killed thousands, promoting himself as some kind of rugged rebel on the run camping out in caves--

So of course he was holed up in a million-dollar compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan less than two miles from a  military academy.

Of course he wasn't roughing it on the lam, tramping from cave to cave like he was Bear Grylls or something.  He was a silver-spoon kid who funded terror for other people to do. When they came to get him, he was desperate not to surrender, and yet, he used a woman as a human shield. His wife. (EDIT: Or this could be bullshit.)

That is pretty damn ignoble, I don't care who you are.