The fear machine kicks to life once again, and releasing classified information to spark that engine is just par for the course. Via Digby from Bruce Greenwald:
The Administration’s purported efforts to find radiological activity in Muslim mosques is now supposed to be thrown onto the pile along with its lawless NSA eavesdropping program, so that the whole confusing controversy is aggregated into nothing more than the same tired, irrational terrorist-defending fetish of trying to impede George Bush in his valiant crusade to protect us from The Terrorists. And sure enough, like puppets on cue, the most blindly loyal of the Bush defenders are spitting out exactly this scary tale.And with the images now darkly dancing around in our heads of Muslims hiding in their mosques in Los Angeles and Queens and Georgia suburbs and maybe in your own backyard, standing over a toxic brew of radiology and TNT ready to zap us all with their mushroom clouds, all of this annoying chatter about FISA and the Fourth Amendment and the NSA is supposed to meekly fade away, drowned to death by nightmares of our children with their hair on fire and glowing in the dark and George Bush trying to save them.
Digby notes:
He asks if they will get away with it again. I dunno. At some point you have to wonder if the citizens of the US will tire of playing this little fantasy of being a nation under seige (while they shop til they drop) and want to switch the channel to little “Morning in America.”I heard a stranger in a line at the book store say the other day that he was tired of hearing the president talk about “protecting us” like he’s some kind of super hero. It’s possible that they’ve gone to the well with this one too many times. We’ll see.
A certain amount of people will believe it no matter what. That much we already know. As always, fear is an integral component to solidfying power and controlling the message. When the message no longer has validiity, when real time events and circumstances don’t jibe with the message, then a disconnect occurs.
The problem is, we live in a world where any terror event, whether on these shores or not, big or small, is used to proffer fear, as the attack in London showed all too well. The fear machine jumped on it with relish. But, of course, a simple visit to Little Green Footballs any day of the week will prove the point as well.
