Ridge and the Technicolor Dreamcode

Here's a question I have about Ridge and his Technicolor DreamCode: Do you think Americans will act surprised and victimized when bombs start going off in our country, wounding and killing a lot of people, or will we be less hypocritical than that? Yeah, I agree, we'll act surprised. We'll be surprised and outraged. "How dare people attack us like this?" we will all be encouraged to yell. And at least we will be able to hate the people who blow us up with bombs. That seems a fair trade - losing our safety and our open society BUT gaining the opportunity to hate other people.

As we all act like little gods with our online polls and opinion polls - "53% of people agree we should bomb the f--- out of some brown people, while 70% say we should get permission from the UN before we start making them good and dead", we seem to forget that terrorists have knives to our throats as well. The domestic attacks may not be too bad, if our intelligence agencies don't drop the ball, but there are bound to be some, and there are bound to be more Americans dead. Bush has sentenced these people, who will die in terrorist attacks on US soil, to death with his war. They will be just as dead as the Iraqis we will kill (starting on Thursday!) and the dead we will suffer in our military, and he has sentenced the rest of us to having to worry that we will be next. Every person who perishes by the hand of Al Qaeda in the months and years to come can now thank Mr. Bush for making us all much less safe, an outcome predicted by almost everyone who knows anything about how terrorism and world opinion work.

Oh well, on to war. As a friend of a colleague wrote yesterday, "If our leaders take this weighty path, there is good reason. (Bush is a politician. Do you think he is doing this to promote his career or to be macho or what? The only answer is that he and his staff honestly believe there is a tremendous threat to us and the world and they have better information than you and I.)" Indeed. They certainly aren't sharing their "better information" with anyone, are they?

Religious Wackos Watch

Some of you may remember "The Bible Code" by Michael Drosnin, published a few years ago. It tortured the text of the bible and tried to make predictions based on numerology, etc. Typical anti-rational hoo-hah. I found this funny site which took him up on his challenge about the significance of the "code" he found, and looked in another book, this time Moby Dick. Send this one to your gullible friends.

Operation False Pretense Watch

The NY Times sounds almost as sad as I feel in this condemnation of the terrible blunders that have led us to war in this editorial. I wonder if they regret all of those pieces on Gore and his lying by Katherine Seelye, or if they ever wonder if they shouldn't have printed year after year about the Whitewater "scandal" when it was clear from the beginning there was no wrongdoing there. Oh well. We're all in the same boat now.

Paul Krugman on the aftermath of the war.

Jimmy Breslin, who seems to be in a darker mood than I am these days, on our God-blessed war.

Media Watch

Dan Kennedy already seems to be predicting that the tide has turned for the conservative media. I don't think I'm that hopeful.

Funny spoof of the little emperor's "press conference".

Bartcop Watch

Here's a funny rebuttal to a Fred Barnes pro-war editorial from Bartcop. Language Alert.

Humor Watch

See this for more fun with those ready.gov terrorism icons.