Milkin’ it

 The dead will still be just as dead, and you won’t benefit from it.  The families of the dead won’t benefit from it. The country won’t benefit from it.  Nobody will, except the networks, which will enjoy a low cost day of high ratings. Come join Cookie and Bret and Geraldo and Sam and sob convulsively as they deliver themselves of sonorous vapidities about how We’ve All Changed or how the nation Has Changed or how Putsch Needs Changing or whatever.

 If you’re like me, though, you’ll think about it.  There won’t be anything unusual there; since if you’re like me, you’ve thought about it at least once every day since it happened.

 And even though you know that Ashcroft, with his stupid color-coded threat assessments, is a paranoid twit, you’ll spend the day unconsciously holding your breath, hoping not to hear something really terrible on the radio.  Some folks are going to wallow in that, too.  Some folks like being scared and apprehensive.  More power to ‘em.

 I got fed up with TV coverage about three days after it happened.  I got angry about two weeks after that, when I stumbled across Faux News.  They were STILL showing the planes hitting the buildings, and the buildings falling, from every conceivable angle, in slow motion, filtered, with patriotic music in the background and a virtual flag waving in the corner of the screen so that nobody would doubt Faux’s patriotic intent.

 I didn’t doubt that they were milking it for all it was worth.  Grief was replaced by profound disgust.  I wrote at the time, “Rupert Murdoch, who has done more than any single individual in the history of the earth to destroy freedom of the press, made the incredible statement, ‘We'll do whatever is our patriotic duty.' This from an Australian son of a bitch with a whore citizenship who openly bribed the Speaker of the House in order to get several billion dollars worth of stations in America in his grasp, and spent the past eight years doing everything he could to destroy the President of the United States.  Take your ‘patriotic duty’ and ram it up your sleazy ass, Murdoch.  We don’t need to hear from scumbags like you about ‘patriotic duty.’”

 By then, of course, we were realizing that some folks were taking advantage of the situation.  It wasn’t just the con artists who set up scams ranging from phony insurance claims to promises to psychically connect with the dead – for a good fee, of course.

 Those folks were contemptible, but at least they were operating out of pragmatic greed, rather than actual malice.

 The politicians and self-styled moral leaders of the country were worse. Orrin Hatch immediately started pressing for his beloved “Star Wars” scheme, while avoiding answering the inevitable questions about how Star Wars might have prevented any of the events of 9/11. Trent Lott suggested that criticizing the President would be unpatriotic. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said America had it coming because it allowed liberalism.  The right wing rammed through the 800 page PATRIOT ACT, and we’re still discovering just how much of what America special that nasty, fascist little piece of work would destroy if we let it.

 Milking it.

 We went on to attack Afghanistan on the specious rationale that because terrorists were believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, we had the right to take over the government and replace it with our own puppet, one more kindly disposed to running an oil pipeline through for us.  We gleefully massacred several thousand Afghani civilians, and it’s almost certain that not one of them was involved in WTC, or even had any advance knowledge that it would happen.

 Patting ourselves on our back for our courageous and morally superior massacre, we started looking around to see who else we could beat up.

 There was Saudi Arabia, home to Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 18 hijackers, and the money behind al-Qaida, and chief exporter of Moslem terrorists, but they had oil and lots of money, and let’s face it: our administration is a corporate-owned coward.

 They needed an enemy who wouldn’t be expensive.

 Now here’s an irony.  In the days following the attacks, I considered Saddam Hussein to be a prime suspect.  He had the motive – we bombed him for three months and killed over a quarter million people over a misunderstanding that we ourselves caused.  He had the means, and, most likely, the opportunity.  The government was insisting that Osama bin Laden was responsible, and when it wasn’t presenting any proof it claimed to have, or worse, was coming up with ridiculous evidence, such as the Egyptian passport that miraculously fluttered down from the plane that struck the North Tower, only to land unharmed on mounds of debris a block or so away.  Or the videotape in which one of the participants refers to a journey made three weeks after the tape was supposedly found.

 So I suspected Saddam. Caught flak for that, too.  To this day, there’s one right winger who likes to throw a quote of mine at me: “I’m still not 100% sure it was Osama bin Laden”.  I imagine he thinks this demonstrates something, but I’m not sure what.  I wasn’t 100% sure when I wrote it, and I’m still not.

 But I am 95% sure, and the sad thing is that I reached this conclusion DESPITE what Putsch and his administration told me, and not because of it.

 We attacked a defenseless country and massacred thousands of civilians, but never mind.  We weren’t real serious about it.  After failing to capture Osama bin Laden, Putsch told the American people he wasn’t that important anyway.

 Heh, heh.  Just a joke, folks.  Sorry about that wedding thing.

 In the past few weeks, Putsch tried telling the American people that Saddam was responsible for 9/11.  Never mind that there had never been a shred of evidence unearthed that in any way linked him to it.  Never mind that he was an adversary of the Moslem fundamentalist extremists, as much so as Mubarrak in Egypt or the junta in Turkey that is clinging to power. Never mind that Putsch and his gang spent the previous eleven months insisting that some one else was responsible, and in the name of vengeance for the American people, bombing Afghanistan for it.

 The cynical shift in scenario-swaping was a disgraceful effort on the eve of the anniversary to try to, once again, manipulate the grief and rage the American people felt in order to further his own ends.

 The hard core right, which never thought for itself to begin with, obediently all turned at once and decided that it was Saddam all along, and that Osama and Afghanistan weren’t even real suspects.  It was as weird and inhuman as all the propaganda used to say the Russian people were like under communism.  Automatons.  Sheep.  Androids.  Cows.

 Cows being milked.

 Fortunately, most people had clear and distinct memories of the government’s assurances that it was Osama bin Laden, and of the fact that he was the reason we attacked Afghanistan.  Usually politicians can count on the short memories of people, but this time, it was over an issue that was too important to most people, and far too many gave Putsch a “what in the hell are you talking about?” look.

 In the past two days, the administration has dropped the “Saddam was behind 9/11" crap. They aren’t admitting it was crap, but they stopped trying to sell the idea.

 They finally told a lie so big, so egregious, that even their own followers started asking questions.

 And that is where we stand.  Putsch will keep working to find a way to blame Saddam for terrorism, and he’ll make shrill cries about Saddam getting nukes, as if that is in any way worse than China having nukes, or Israel, or Pakistan, or America.

 And the usual crowd who don’t much give a damn who attacked America as long as lots of people die for it will cheer him on.  In the name of patriotism, of course.

 Putsch will milk it, because he’s an amoral, vicious bastard and that’s the only way he can manage.

 Well, remember, folks: not everything said about 9/11 today will be mawkish, vacuous, self-serving crap.  Some will be simple, sincere, and heartfelt.  Some of it will matter.

 What you, as a person,  think and feel will be the same.

 If 9/11 gave evil opportunists excuses to run and ruin lives, it also brought out the best, even in some of those opportunists.  Rush Limbaugh sided, if briefly, with liberals and defended them against the vicious and unfair attacks that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson made.  Even Putsch made a point of going to a mosque and pleading with the American public to not blindly blame the nearly two million Moslems living in America for the attacks.