His delivery is over the top for my taste, but the points he brings up about the law itself, about the holes in the President’s logic, and about the telecom immunity portions are dead on. The President is lying about the role of this bill and the immediacy of action. In fact, this bill could die tomorrow and the surveillance begun under the PAA would be in force until the next President comes into office. The President and the Republicans are putting on a show, prioritizing telecoms and their own lawbreaking over you, me, and the rule of law in our land.

It would be nice if those law-and-order conservatives who scream about immigration laws would step up and treat big companies with big donors the same way. The law here is clear. All I ask is that the President and the Republicans follow it and speak truthfully about it.

It’s a remarkable thing that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee is writing an explanation of the RESTORE Act at the Huffington Post. What’s also remarkable, but not surprising considering the Republican influence in the media, is that he’s blogging because neither he nor any other senior Democrats could get Time Magazine to print a response to a factually incorrect article by Joe Klein that distorted the provisions of this important legislation.

Go read it, as it explains the safeguards and balancing that the RESTORE Act does in order to keep the government from spying on private citizens, political opponents, or businesses and allows our agencies to spy on terrorists and other foreign nationals.

Remember, 9/11 changed everything:

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

Liars.

Update: Someone over Atrios’s place points out that assuming other telecom companies went along with this program when Qwest turned it down, this program failed to prevent 9/11. There is a lot of conjecture here (program implemented by other telecoms, it was implemented a meaningful time before 9/11), but the fact that these companies are lobbying hard for amnesty for violating any laws seems to indicate that they’ve done something they’re worried about. This program seems to fit those parameters…

After reading about the recent bomb “scare” that happened at Logan Airport, where an MIT student was nearly killed by police because she wore a breadboard and a battery on her sweatshirt as a piece of wearable art, my reaction was that the Boston police severely overreacted. Others, including some friends, disagreed.

I thought about this some more, and I stand by my original reaction. This isn’t to say that I don’t understand the concern created by batteries and wires on an unknown person in an unknown configuration. I get that. Several things, however, bother me greatly about what happened here.

First, the escalation to weapons drawn happened after she was asked by an airport employee what it was and after she responded that it was art:

A Massachusetts Port Authority staffer manning an information booth in the terminal became suspicious when Simpson — wearing the device — approached to ask about an incoming flight, Pare said. She did not respond when the employee asked her about the device she was wearing, so the employee repeated the question, police said.

Simpson then said the device was artwork and left the counter and walked around the terminal area, causing some employees to leave the building in fear, police said.

This happened before the police were involved, and the student answered honestly. Clearly, the airport staffer didn’t believe her. The obvious question is, then, what do I think should’ve happened next in a situation where the employee didn’t believe the person. I don’t know, because everything I can think of assumes a certain amount of common sense or minimal bravery from the staffer. Really, though, I think this falls on the trooper or the system here that doesn’t have a step between staffer fear and guns drawn, twitch and you die mode. At least have someone trained look. If that’s deemed too unsafe, have an expert sitting in the security office and use one of the myriad cameras that cover the airport terminals and grounds.

Second, I have an issue with charges being pressed in this case. It’s asinine. She didn’t have a bomb, nor was it intended to be a hoax device. A hoax device shouldn’t be whatever an airport staffer imagines to be a bomb. It should be a device intended to look like a bomb. Since we don’t teach people in school or through fancy government PSAs what bombs look like (indeed, the government is attempting to remove directions and specifications on actual bombs and bomb building from the Internet and libraries), this is essentially a “you scared people” law. It’s dumb. Ignorance on the part of others shouldn’t put you in jail.

Third, why is wearing this to an airport more dangerous to the public than wearing it on the T? Walking down the street in Boston? Going to the movies? Going to breakfast in the dining hall at MIT? In other words, if the place were not the airport, does your opinion of the police reaction change? If a bystander/staffer in one of those places thought Simpson had a bomb, would you want the police doing the same thing there? If she went to a nightclub (scenes of some horrific bombings in Europe in the 80s and 90s)? Shouldn’t our estimation of whether she was wearing a bomb and how the police should react remain consistent in most public places?

Fourth, and most troubling to me, is that the security here, if you want to call it that, is based entirely on the the quality of the finish. In other words, if her art had looked like this:

… it apparently would’ve been OK (it contains more or less the same components). The thing is, it could still have been a bomb. Objectively, there’s no difference… blinking lights, battery, wires. But, it’s in a nice case. (here’s the back of the Defcon badge above).

So, if you’re a terrorist, apparently you can walk into Logan if your bomb is in a nice plastic box. That’s your security.

It’s absurd that our society has gotten to the point that fear makes ignorance and leaping to conclusions OK. And that it makes it OK for a major in the Massachusetts State Police to get in front of a podium and say this:

Simpson was “extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used,” Pare said. “She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.”

You can argue that the police have to protect themselves, and I’d agree. But they’re also supposed to protect us, and that means putting their lives on the line. I remember being at a wedding in 2000. At our table was a member of the NYPD bomb squad. He was complaining about how most of his calls were obvious false alarms. Someone leaves a box of donuts on the subway and it becomes a suspicious package. He was joking that they just walked up to them and kicked them and said, “Yup, it’s a box of donuts.” I presume he wasn’t entirely serious, but I also got the impression that they didn’t break out the robots and remote detonation gear for every call.

The fact of the matter is that these are low probability events. Very low. The most recent example of a public, small scale bombing in the U.S. was the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Prior to 9/11, cops seemed to take context into consideration. Now, we’ve ratcheted up the fear so high that everything is a threat, every shadow hides a terrorist, and everyone’s fear is actionable intelligence.

Is this really the world we live in? Or is it the world that we’ve scared ourselves into? I believe it to be the latter. Someone needs to make the case that it’s the former, because I see no evidence of it. Educate me in the comments below.

More on this, including some great roundups of background, at the Machinist blog and Boing Boing (loads of links).

Update: Some interesting items in the comment thread. First, illustrating the problems with the hoax device law:

Boston police pulled this same stunt with Joe Previtera, a nonviolent protester, in 2006. He was doing a silent imitation of the famous photo of the hooded guy standing on a box from Abu Ghraib. The police arrested him — as far as anyone can tell, because they disliked his politics — and claimed that the speaker wires hanging from his wrists constituted a “hoax device.”

Again, there’s no way no one on the police force, or even in the crowd present at the time, didn’t know that the wires were part of the original images from Abu Ghraib.

Second, from a Fark thread comes this image, which pretty much sums the whole thing up for me:

I guess that’s what the police believe our world should be. But only at the airport. Outside the terminal building. On a traffic island.

This is one of the best answers he gave in an interview with Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com. This is a major challenge we face as a nation with regard to terrorism, the balance between security and civil rights. His answer is the best one I’ve heard, period.

It saddens me that it even has to be an issue — the fact that “defending the Constitution” even has to be an issue in the presidential race.

But there is an audience for this. This is really important. This is not a narrow audience. This is a broad audience. This is an audience that will surprise you if articulated well. We can win on this.

A campaign for president allows you to have a megaphone here on a national scale to talk about these things, at a time when this crowd, if it continues, can enable you to stop them, do even more than raise the issues. But secondly, if I don’t win this thing, I want everyone else to be talking about these issues.

I think it reaches into a conservative constituency who ought to care about this as much, and does in many ways. So it gives us a chance to do that.

I carry every day, and have for 26 years, a copy of the U.S. Constitution given to me by Robert Byrd [takes Constitution out of his back pocket]. And to me, what could be more fundamental? With all due respect, I care about health care, education, global warming. But if you get this wrong — what do you got? A trade association. Who wants to be president of a trade association?

And this [holding the Constitution] is the spark, the illumination, it is, if I may so say, the envy of many around the world. We have been a guiding set of principles. What is going on with the rule of law isn’t just happening here. . . Other countries are saying, “We can do this, too.” So there has been an erosion in the world with the rule of the law. Having led the world in the rule of law in the post-World War II period, and having nations reluctantly moving in the direction we were moving in, and they now see the U.S. has retreated, and they are making a hasty retreat themselves.

Josh Tucker [of NYU] makes the point about the Soviet Union collapse — You can make the case that it was military, and that was part of it, but he believes and I believe that it was the rule of law. It was Eastern European countries recognizing that this was a total sham, beginning with the Prague Spring and 1956. The Soviet Union collapsed because it rotted from within, they just rotted without the rule of law. So in addition to the other factors, this has international reverberations, beyond just what happens in our own country.

GG: Well, it is good to see the real passion and conviction that you obviously have for these constitutional issues.

CD: I will never forget, it was a night in New Hampshire back last fall, and I’m talking about health care and talking about education and something else — and I said “I just want to share with you something I care about.” And I talked about this and the room exploded. And I was startled and I realized, “God, people really do care.” I thought I was the only one who did. You sound very arcane when you talk about the Military Commissions Act. But this really reasonates [sic. -- sujal].

The brackets above, except for the very last one, are in the original piece on Salon.com. They are not my additions.

This is why how we debate changes like the current FISA bill matter so much. We are the standard bearer for the Rule of Law. The United States should stand for that, so when we see our Vice President playing Constitutional games (not part of the Executive??) or the President taking shortcuts around the courts and around Congress, we need to stand up. Dodd’s consistent stand on this issue is another reason I’m supporting his candidacy.

The only way he can get this message out is if he can stay in the race and make a strong showing in the early primaries. He needs to be part of the debates, on TV and in the campaign. Until public financing happens, that means he needs money. Hit the blue button on the left and donate to his campaign today.

The rest of Greenwald’s interview with Dodd is pretty good, and he asks some tough questions, especially about the FISA debates. Worth reading the rest.

His special comment addresses Chertoff’s vague warning about Americans being at greater risk of attack based on his gut feeling. He also talks about the government report that reported that al-Qaeda has rebuilt it’s operational strength. Great job Bush is doing on that war on terror, if that’s true…

I just finished watching V for Vendetta on HD-DVD. I read the graphic novel a while ago, right around when the movie came out and enjoyed it. The political overtones and the almost surreal storyline make for a great graphic novel. Clearly influenced by 1980’s British (and American) politics, the book sets up an interesting world in a post-nuclear holocaust Britain that succumbs to fascism. That world was set in the near future then, which I guess would be right now. The story and the society in the novel have some eerie parallels in our modern world. It’s not hard to pull some symbolism out of the novel to our modern world shaped by terrorism.

Unfortunately, the movie takes this idea and kicks it way, way over the top. In general, I’m sympathetic to the idea that societies must be vigilant against those that would offer safety in conformity. The government’s motto in the novel/movie is “Strength through Unity, Unity through Faith”), and I definitely bristle at that. Unfortunately, the film takes the novel, introduces the vocabulary of our modern battle with terrorism, and bludgeons the viewer over the head several times during the movie. It’s almost as if they took a smart novel and tried to dumb it down so that everyone would get the point. It’s especially bad as the style of V for Vendetta is over the top. V, the protagonist, is over-the-top, a theatrical person who speaks in monologues to explain his purpose to a populace that has forgotten it’s own purpose in society. He isn’t written subtly.

Thankfully these moments are relatively few and, assuming you like stylized novels/films like Sin City, the movie ends up being pretty good. A lot of things are different in the film, so if you’ve read the novel, be prepared to reacquaint yourself with a number of the minor characters. The “Fate” computer is gone, as is the entire development of the Chancellor’s character.

The soundtrack to the film is solid, by the way. The closing credits feature a song by Ethan Stoller called BKAB. The version used in the movie had clips of Malcolm X and Gloria Steinem speeches playing over BKAB’s Bollywood influenced beats and samples. Cool piece, especially since I’m a fan of artists that fuse Indian and Western beats/music. Karsh Kale, Cornershop, Nitin Sawhney, etc. are all interesting artists if you’re into that. BKAB is only available from the artist directly, FYI. I also can’t find a version with the speeches overlay. It’s not on the soundtrack and the artist’s web site says that he’s still working on getting rights to those recordings so he can remix the track with them in there. Interestingly enough, the name of the song comes from a Malcolm X speech. Check out the artist’s site for an explanation.

Um, Mayor Menino, the City of Boston, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, please stop the silliness. They were ads, and you overreacted. Don’t continue the madness. No other city freaked out about this stuff, and a little bit of investigation would’ve saved you a bit of grief.

PS. I agree with the post I linked to above, I would be very happy to see a new Mayor in Boston.

(via Atrios)

I could probably just put all of these on FatMixx, but this one seems important. I probably could automate this post, but if you’re not watching Keith Olbermann, you’re completely missing out.

I don’t have much to add. This summarizes the last month or so of the terrorism debate and policy world in one 10 minute segment.

Update: I hate being away for weekends. I hadn’t heard that they found more remains around ground zero. For ****’s sake, are these people so incompetent that they chose to make us feel better instead of actually doing the right thing? First, they lied about the air quality. Now we have this. This stuff was always going to come out. Treat the public like the adults they are, that’s all I really want.

I think Keith Olbermann is trying to the be Edward R Murrow of our time…and heavens knows we could use it. I’m glad that someone in the mainstream media is saying this. His latest commentary, published Oct 19, is truly to the point:

And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing…A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

In times of fright, we have been only human. We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us. We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.” We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Read the rest of the article. It is a bit long, but worth reading.

Update (from sujal): Here’s the video:

I very much don’t understand what in the world is wrong with the National Republican Party:

In any case, Marc Lynch makes the right criticism of the Republican ad. He thinks that al-Qaeda’s media arm, al-Sahab, must be pretty jazzed that the GOP is helping the cause:

This is not just a video which suggests that Republicans will be better at fighting terror. It actually very closely resembles real al-Qaeda videos….This video would not look out of place on a jihadi forum, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it actually gets posted on them and admired (although the production values are a bit low for an actual al-Sahab product).

Anyone involved in analyzing or combating al-Qaeda’s media strategies has to be astounded that the Republican National Committee has financed, produced, distributed on the internet, and aired on US television what is for all intents and purposes an al-Qaeda recruitment video. The video, if it works as intended, will frighten the American people and influence American politics… just like al-Qaeda’s own videos. Bin Laden couldn’t be prouder, or more grateful, especially since it didn’t cost him a thing.

Read the whole thing for more on this theme. Marc notes that the Arab media has caught on to this “bizarre turn of events” even if the American media hasn’t.

I can say that I’m personally tired of being afraid. I was tired in about 2002, and I wanted to vote for people who would try to actually deal with terrorism instead of using it as a cudgel to beat down dissent.

My sense is that I’m not alone, and this trick of using fear to scare us into the R column isn’t going to work anymore. It would help if more of our political commentariat would actually try to inform us rather than repeating the same tired conventional wisdom all the time. It would be the easiest way to raise the quality of debate.

To put it succinctly, the media needs to report both what politicians do as well as what they say. It’s one thing to claim to be strong on terror, but another to advocate a policy and then unwaveringly defend it when it’s clearly failed. Why so many people can be wrong but still taken seriously is beyond me.

On one hand, we have Joe Lieberman, who voted for the detainee bill, and who clearly doesn’t get why America is special. On the other hand, we have our senior Senator from Connecticut, who wrote a very timely editorial in the LA Times explaining why he voted nay. I’ve excerpted a part below, but you should go read the whole thing. (via The Washington Note)

SIXTY YEARS AGO today, at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, the verdicts were read in a trial that will forever define the punishment of war criminals. One by one, the 22 top surviving Nazi officers of Adolf Hitler were sentenced. By the time the gavel sounded, three had been acquitted, seven sent to prison and 12 condemned to death.

One of the people in court that day was my father, 38-year-old attorney Thomas Dodd, who was the No. 2 prosecutor for the United States behind Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. My father always considered Nuremberg to be the most meaningful experience of his life.

My father wrote more than 400 letters to my mother from Nuremberg. Many are devoted to how much he missed his wife and children; others to the Nazis he had met.

But some of his harshest words were reserved for the Russians, who had little interest in a fair trial. In one letter, he tells the story of a toast offered by a visiting Soviet dignitary, who raised a glass and said: “May the road for these war criminals from the courthouse to the grave be a very short one.”

“I winced,” my father wrote, “and I could see that Judge [John J.] Parker, the American alternative, was certainly embarrassed.”

But of course, a quick trial that led to quick executions was the temptation. The world had seen a monstrous regime try to conquer the world. It had seen them take the lives of more than tens of millions of men, women and children.

Why not just give in to vengeance? Why not just shoot them, as Winston Churchill wanted to do? Why not just succumb to the law of power politics and impose our will without any regard to principle? Why not just give in to violence, which was certainly within our ability and, many argued, within our right?

Why not? Because the United States has always stood for something more.

We have, and we should always stand for something more. Dodd finishes with this quote:

We would do well to remember the words of Justice Jackson: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

Thank you, Senator Dodd, for speaking up.

(Of course, I have to ask, where were you for the past 3 weeks?)

Glenn Grenwald highlights these four paragraphs from a NYT article covering the release of the new National Intelligence Estimate:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

I agree with Greenwald: This should get turned into a commercial and should be the only commercial run nationally by the DSCC and DCCC.

Hopefully, we’ll see some ads from Ned Lamont about this since Joe Lieberman doesn’t have a problem with how the war is being conducted.

Update: In case you’re not familiar with what NIE’s represent, here is Wikipedia’s entry and an entry from SourceWatch.

You know when Fox News starts hammering on something, it’s part of the national Republican strategy (must be nice to have a party propaganda network). Unsurprisingly, the new strategy is “Blame Clinton” (they’re not too original, these national Republicans). Chris Wallace gets into the act by securing an interview with Clinton under the guise of talking about The Clinton Global Initiative, then asking nearly immediately “Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaeda out of business…”

Clinton apparently smacked him down, as he ought to. Reading any of the sources, such as Richard Clarke’s excellent book or the more administration friendly Plan of Attack and you’ll learn the same thing: the Clinton administration made mistakes, but they took the threat of terrorism very seriously. Not one person denies Clarke’s assertion that the message from Sandy Berger and Clarke to the incoming Bush administration was that terrorism would consume more administration resources than anything else.

If that isn’t enough, the foreign policy goals as outlined by President Bush in 2001 speak volumes. The single most important piece of the Bush foreign policy plan in 2001 was the missile defense program. We bucked the ABM treaty, the first of several international agreements we’ve decided to renege on during the Bush administration.

The point here isn’t that Clinton was some sort of terrorist fighting super-President, but simply that this new attempt to shift all blame to Clinton is simply a political move designed to help the Republican’s flagging chances this fall. As Clinton himself says in this interview (airing tomorrow):

But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clark [sic], who got demoted.

Update: As expected, the blogosphere is doing their research. Think Progress has more of the transcript than the USA Today piece I linked to earlier, including a section where Clinton reads like he’s pissed off. I’m not really sure I blame him.

Olbermann might be the most courageous broadcaster on television after Stephen Colbert, as his criticism of the administration has always been fact based and unflinching. I just watched his editorial commentary about 9/11, the lack of a memorial on Ground Zero, and the administration in general and was floored. It is, by far, the most eloquent commentary I’ve seen from Olbermann.

I’ve excerpted a part below. Olbermann’s overall metaphor doesn’t necessarily work for me, but this section, the meat of this editorial, summarizes the pain and futility of this administration. I’ve written before that I also will never forgive or forget how this president destroyed that moment of unity after 9/11. It wasn’t just our nation but the world that was united, an improbable opportunity to change the world in the ashes of tragedy. It was the first time NATO invoked Article 5 of the treaty declaring our nation under attack. Le Monde ran the headline “We are all Americans now” and nearly every leader of every country expressed their support and sympathy.

In the years since, we have gone from neighbor to pariah, from “Nous sommes tous Américains” to Freedom Fries, and from chasing bin Ladin to chasing phantom WMD. As Olbermann eloquently points out, the President chose to use 9/11 as a wedge issue. It simply became a political tool that was used to badger Democrats into submission and to bolster numbers at the polls. Every time he invokes the memory of those that perished to pursue a domestic political agenda, every photo op, every claim that critics have “forgotten the lessons of 9/11″ cheapens their memory. It reduces them to props in a political game, and it’s despicable.

This is why, when the President speaks of bipartisanship, we should reflect upon the past five years and examine our “bipartisanship” moments on the most important issue of our time. Bipartisanship brought us the war in Iraq because of several deftly timed votes. Bipartisanship brought us zero accountability in government. When the President speaks of bipartisanship, he speaks only of bipartisanship that furthers his political agenda.

As he did today, the President will invoke bipartisanship in the weeks and months to come to stave off electoral losses. I hope all of us, Republicans, Democrats and Independents recognize that for what it is. Many incumbents, including our own Senator here in Connecticut, are joining the President’s chorus, hoping that claims of bipartisanship also absolve them of accountability. We owe it to ourselves and to our nation to vote for accountability. Hopefully, then, we can get the job done, both at Ground Zero and in the hills of Pakistan, wherever bin Ladin might be.

Here’s the section I mentioned. Watch the whole editorial. You won’t be sorry.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is, its symbolism — of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it… was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government, by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, “bi-partisanship” meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused; as appeasers; as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, “validate the strategy of the terrorists.”

They promised protection, and then showed that to them “protection” meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken… a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated Al-Qaeda as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11, is “lying by implication.”

The impolite phrase, is “impeachable offense.”

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space… and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible — for anything — in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death… after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections… how dare you or those around you… ever “spin” 9/11.