After having the comfort and joy of his company for two months, I put my eleven year old son on a Southwest 737 last night, to return to his mother for the school year. :( This was my first opportunity for a first-hand look at airport security since the ban on beverages, perfumes, and other liquids and gels was added to the barefoot pilgrimage through the metal detectors, and since the discovery of
Howard Fish's dynamite at the other airport across town gave us a concrete metric of the effectiveness of current air travel security practices.
As we waited in the pre-board area (unaccompanied minors board first), two people in TSA uniforms pulled three people from the line waiting to board flight 1468 (to Baltimore-Washington International, which used to be known as Friendship International when I flew into and out of it, as I frequently did in 1968 as a Washington-based news reporter). I'm lousy at judging people's nationality and/or ethnic origins, but two of the three, a man and a woman neatly dressed in suits who may have been a couple, had skin the approximate color of coffee with a fair amount of cream (about the same as my son's, in fact, and considerably lighter than his Cape Verdean mother's); the third, a casually but sharply attired dark-skinned African-American man talking on a cell phone, seemed to be having trouble suppressing a grin.
After emptying their carryon luggage, pockets, and the woman's purse for examination by the TSA people, the three were permitted to board the aircraft-- preceded only by my son, and ahead of the planeful of other people waiting in line for Southwest's first-come, first-served seating.
Perhaps that's why the African-American man was having trouble containing his mirth.
~~~
With nothing better to do after my son's departure, I came home to see what reactions there might have been to Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion. Nancy Pelosi's wasn't bad (Video @ Crooks and Liars):
What the Secretary must be forgetting is what emboldens the enemy is sending our troop into the line of fire without the equipment they need to protect themselves and get the job done. What emboldens the enemy is sending them there without the military intelligence to get the job done.
But Pelosi's response wasn't a patch on the ass of Keith Olbermann's (Video @ Crooks and Liars. Just watch it.):
Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom-- and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile… it is right — and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril - with a growing evil - powerful and remorseless. That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s - questioning their intellect and their morality.
That government was England’s, in the 1930’s.
It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.
It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.
It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted policies, conclusions - and omniscience — needed to be dismissed.
The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.
Most relevant of all - it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile - at best… morally or intellectually confused.
That critic’s name… was Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.
But the best response I found to Rummy, and to Bush's and Santorum's recent allegations that this country is fighting "Islamofascism," is
Reclaiming The Issues: Islamic Or Republican Fascism?Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival strategy is to redefine the term "fascism" so it can't be applied to them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation." In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a fundamentalist theocracy, not fascism.
But theocracy - the merging of religion and government - is also on the plate for the new American fascists (just as it was for Hitler, who based the Nazi death cult on a "new Christianity" that would bring "a thousand years of peace"), so they don't want to use that term, either.
Hartmann's piece, posted before Rumsfeld's speech, shows that Fascism's founder Benito Mussolini, FDR's Socialist Vice President Henry Wallace, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and current John Birch Society Senior Editor William Norman Grigg would all agree as to who today's genuine Fascists are.
With nothing better to do after my son's departure, I watched a collage of Fox News clips-- collected yesterday within the span of a few hours-- trying to sell a US military attack on Iran (Video @ Think Progress).
But then I read that Fox News' Ratings Take a Nosedive:
Somewhere, Keith Olbermann is sticking pins in a Bill O'Reilly voodoo doll: Fox News' ratings, TVNewser reports, are down since August of last year. Like, way down. Like down 28 percent in primetime among all viewers, down 20 percent in primetime in the "money demo" (viewers aged 25-54) and down 7 percent in daytime viewership overall. In fact, the only place Fox is up is during the day, when they managed a ratings increase of just 2 percent, and even then only in the money demo.And lest you think this is an industry-wide trend, consider this: over the same time period, CNN and MSNBC are up. CNN's up 35 percent during the day -- 46 percent in the money demo -- and up 21 percent in primetime overall, 25 percent in the money demo. MSNBC's ratings increases aren't quite as impressive -- up 6 percent in primetime overall, 8 percent in the money demo, and up 36 percent in the money demo during the day, 26 percent overall.
