I spent an hour earlier watching The Falling Man, a documentary about the search to identify a man who jumped from the World Trade Center. Strangely, the video has never been released in the U.S.A. Or perhaps it's not so strange. The photo itself provoked heated public (ie media) anger when it was published on September 12th, 2001. People just didn't want to be confronted with this imagery (or so the networks told us).

A peculiar kind of media self-censorship ensued. Images like this were quickly replaced by heroic images of brave firefighters, dust-covered WTC survivors, a President standing in the rubble with a megaphone.

I am reminded of the Iraq War, and the War In Afghanistan, and how the media still refuses to show, or even acknowledge, the true horrors of such violence. How can they? These wars would end tomorrow, if people had to endure the truth.

Bernard Weiner at crisispapers.org lists Twenty-Six Things We Now Know Seven Years After 9/11 (an annual update) including for example that the illegal and widespread domestic spying was ordered by Cheney and Bush seven months BEFORE 9/11. The planning for the Iraq War, and the forgeries used to justify it, was also planned before 9-11. The anthrax was almost certainly being prepared in some lab, ready to be mailed out after 9-11, and the PNAC documents about the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" were of course published years earlier. It was all part of a pre-set agenda.

And after seven years they still haven't found Bin Laden or even proved that he was behind the attacks. All their "evidence" has been extracted under torture. And now Dana Perino tells us that Bin Laden was not even the mastermind of 911, as if they never said he was! This is the last 9-11 anniversary on Bush's watch and he's walking away from the whole phoney narrative.

Links at my sig.

Far be it from me to defend Palin, but actually I think your full quote there does provide at least some partial validation of her Lincoln excuse, probably just enough to make this whole "task that is from God" quote disappear from the media narrative.

She says in the next sentence:

That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.

This ties in with what she is saying about Lincoln, praying not that God is on our side, but that we are on God's side. The problem of course is that Palin goes a step further, concluding before she has even said this that the Iraq War really is a "task that is from God".

But we all know that God always hears our prayers, don't we? Especially if you are a Murkan!

And you know, Bush said even worse things about God telling him what to do, and looking into Putin's soul, yadda yadda. And huge swathes of the US public just love this shit.

Like it or not, you won't get much political mileage out of hitting Sarah Palin on religious issues. Well, IMHO anyway. Her original comment stands as a clear insight into her thinking, but she's covered her ass. The original quote deserves to be repeated throughout the campaign, but I don't think you will hear much more on this unless she makes another gaffe.

In other news, did you see this anthrax column at the Register by George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, "a defense affairs think tank and public information group"? This line explaining how the anthrax aerosolized is priceless:

And sorting through mail machines pulverized the anthrax, too.

Link at my sig.

HuffPo link at my sig.

This is pretty shocking IMHO. She clearly drew a blank when Gibson mentioned the "Bush doctrine" and even when he elaborated she didn't get it.

Palin has been living inside a GOP power bubble where embarrassing terms like that are no longer mentioned.

PALIN: When John McCain asked me to be his running mate I didn't blink, Charlie. I didn't blink. I'm ready, Charlie.

GIBSON: So what do you think of the Bush Doctrine?

PALIN: ... (blinks) ....

"Sarah Palin revealed herself in the Charlie Gibson interview on ABC to be nervous,uninformed, green and generally not ready for prime time. The interview was full of stock phrases she was made to memorize, and which she repeated over and over again when stumped. She knows nothing about how Iran is run, or about Pakistan, or about al-Qaeda, and even is ignorant of the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare. It was a shockingly bad performance.

She had the hubris to suggest that her lack of knowledge and experience is a virtue. Why Americans, practical people, would fall for this line is beyond me. Would you want your car to be worked on by an inexperienced and ignorant mechanic? Would you want a plumber messing around with your pipes who did not know his way around wrenches? ...

Help!

As I count it, McCain Palin plans to keep us in Iraq for 100 years, to invade Pakistan, and to fight a war with Russia over Georgia, all at once. They won't just need a draft, they'll need gulags to pull that off!"

AND ON THE BUSH DOCTRINE QUESTION:

"Unbelievable. She not only had no idea what the Bush doctrine was, she tried to BS her way through the question instead of being honest about not having heard of it. It is one thing to be ignorant about something, another not to be willing to admit it. The whole interview is painful for the narrow-minded and ill-informed view of the world it displays, but this is the nadir."

More at the link on my sig. Bookmark Prof Cole, if you haven't already. This guy deserves a Medal Of Honour for all he has done over the last 8 years.