It's "Terrorism" Not "Terror"

It took the media how many years before they admitted that the Bush/Cheney axis duped them into believing that the Invasion of Iraq was based on falsities conjured by Cheney and his cohorts? Let's see, was that five long years?

And how much longer is it going to be before the media admits that they have again been the slaves and dupes of Bush, Cheney and the Bush administration? In what way? By thoughtlessly, mindlessly repeating the word "terror" when they mean either "terrorist" or "terrorism."

This is not an issue of grammar. It is an issue of the way the issue of terrorism and the war on it are framed.

If you accept that this is a "War on Terror," then you are accepting a set of terms which believes that "terror" is not an abstract concept but is somehow a concrete definition of a discrete set of conditions that is universal. It isn't. Aside from a definition that might come from the dictionary, Bush's intentional use of the word "terror" rather than "terrorism" is meant to strike terror in people's hearts.

And he's succeeded. Rather than examine the issue as one of terrorism, perpetrated by discrete groups, terror evokes a global sense of peril, that no matter where one is, one is unsafe. This is patently untrue.

After all, Al Qaeda did not send all that anthrax through the mail. That was domestic. Terrorism. Not "terror."

It is actually quite shameful the way that Bush has chosen to frame the subject in this way, to create fear-mongering and perpetuate a sense of imminent peril. Shameful. We have more to fear from what he has done to our economy. And the fact that we will continue to pay for these mistakes by the big businesses that supported him--think big auto and big oil.

Indeed, Bush was quite successful in making people fear for their lives four years ago, which is how he won the re-election. People felt unsafe, though it is clear that they had nothing to fear. Nothing has happened to the American people over the last four years on our soil that was not instigated by Big Business and the mentality of The Rules Don't Apply To Me.

So when is it that the media, including NPR shows like All Things Considered and PRI shows like The World, are going to demand that their reporters report accurately.

McCain's Superfluos in Bailout, Yet Exploits it as Political Opportunity

An excerpt from Mark Anderson's blog on the Strategic News Service, which argues that McCain is not only superfluous to brokering a deal--he isn't even part of the committee--but that he is exploiting it, an opportunity to politicize what transcends this small man's personal goals. In short, he is using this as an opportunity to aggrandize himself, even though he is doing nothing and is unimportant to the entire situation.

"September 25th, 2008

It’s hard to be a hero, when no one wants you.

Imagine, John McCain talks George Bush into having a special meeting of just him, George, Obama (which will make him look like he is being beckoned), and a few Congressional heads, to sort out the big mess.

Only problem: it was already sorted out.

Then, a few hours late from his campaign speech at the Clinton Initiative in NYC, McCain shows up. Unfortunately, he has a whole new document in hand, that no one, not the president, not the cabinet, not the taxi driver, has seen before.

As Reid put it later: we had a deal, and then McCain showed up.

McCain NEEDS dissension, so he can look like a leader. He also needs an excuse to prevent him from showing up at the debate with Obama, where he will probably lose.

Most important, he needs to show the far right that he is NOT Bush.

So, decrying campaing politics, he uses Bush to call an un-needed meeting, while the real negotiators are doing really good work, then he shows up, blows up the meeting, blows off Bush et al., and — the country is nowhere, and he creates a situation in which he now can say that he must really skip the debate, because, thanks to him, there really is no deal.

In some races, there is a disqualifying behavior. Cheating, for instance. If this presidential campaign were a footrace in Somalia, McCain would be drawn and quartered.

Cheating is bad."

And the NY Times' view is that Congressional Republicans remain skeptical of McCain's "helpfulness" in resolving this crisis, the single largest financial bailout proposed in US History, which will essentially create an "Economic Czar" with NO oversight.

"Mr. McCain’s advisers cast his role on Friday as a supportive, essential presence to Republicans who were enraged by what they considered their harsh treatment at the White House on Thursday afternoon, and the dismissive attitude of their Republican colleagues in the Senate. They also tried to push back against a narrative that emerged Thursday, which portrayed Mr. McCain as injecting partisan politics into delicate dealmaking, and replace it with the image of a presidential candidate who stopped a bad deal from going through...many House Republicans remain deeply skeptical of Mr. McCain, and it is not clear whether he would have had the clout to change any minds in the Republican caucus. One of Mr. McCain’s own advisers said Friday that the financial crisis found the senator working with people who were “not historically his closest friends on Capitol Hill.”

Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, said that “if McCain came out and said, ‘Here’s a deal that I like,’ that would be significant.” But when asked if lawmakers would back a deal just because it had Mr. McCain’s support, Mr. Kingston said: “Not so much. This becomes a vote of conscience. It’s a vote of principle.”

Finally, why is it that no one notices that, once again, the Bush/Cheney axis is proposing another significant governmental move that increases BIG GOVERNMENT without regulation.

With our civil rights continually being whittled away, we should be more vigilant about the "package" being proposed now.

As for McCain, do we really want someone who thinks that all that matters today is to appear as hawkish as possible regarding the Iraq war, hoping that no one will notice that he was WRONG about the war, and that he will "cut spending."

Did no one notice he has no plan. For anything?