Letters to the Editor
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Inference, Innuendo, and Insinuation
It must be the heat, and my mind ain't working right. But from where I sit it appears now that most of the facts about how this country got into its current wretched state of affairs are out there, in abundance. Tonight Frontline, for instance, outlined the chain of events prompted by Dick "The Dark Side" Cheney. You watch and almost weep. Not at the facts necessarily but at the fact this story keeps being shown again and again. It's similar in nature to the criminal in "Clockwork Orange" with his eyes held open while watching violence until it sickens him.
You're checking out truthout, Sidney Blumenthal, Juan Cole, Washington Monthly, and other blogs. You're following everything Wilson and Plame say. And Colin Powell. And Murtha. But, nonetheless, the tragedy stays stuck in act 2. You're so desperate, you're hoping a crisply edited montage on The Daily Show will do it. Or a segment on Lou Dobbs. Yeah, maybe that's it -- it'll be immigration that topples those guys. But no. Weeks give way to months.
If you're like me, so disgusted at nearly everything political on both sides of the aisle (Hillary Clinton? You gotta be kidding?), you're waiting to see some sign of a total administration collapse, or an unmentionable event happen to certain leaders, or Fitzgerald to indict an upper tier operative -- Something, Anything, that will move this tragedy into a closing act. You're wondering, How much longer can the American people, the media, leaders in and out of office pass through their everyday existence and not do something to change this big mess.
And then you stumble across, Is the NSA Spying on U.S. Internet Traffic? Wow, you say to yourself, maybe, just maybe, the American people -- that alert breed of concerned citizens who cherish their freedoms -- will seize on this issue. This will be the history maker. The Regime changer. The Decider's undoing. And then as you read two anonymous sources so fearful of their careers that they say virtually nothing that will identify them or anything they've ever encountered beyond a vague sense of illicit activity, you realize, nope, this isn't that decisive moment you've been waiting for.
Is it perhaps because the writer of the story is too afraid of revealing info that could lead to horrible penalties, torture or, worse, a bad desk job in DC? Who really knows? We've sort of entered that Kafka Zone where the imaginable seems real and the real is routinely ignored. In fact, in the Big Picture, the culprits have been named. Sourced. Quoted. And revealed. There are abundant memos, neocon documents, tangible cover-ups, testimony by decorated generals, falsified data, not to mention the failed war on terror, and the grandiose debacle in Iraq. But apparently, that's not enough. Nope.
People continuously cite fascists, who're supposedly everywhere. Religious fascists. Right and left wing fascists. It's become the term du jour. Then there are the nut left, environmental wackos, apathetic centrists, gay rights activists, evangelical nazis, totalitarian Muslims, and, other assorted characters who are also, supposedly, ruining America. Is it possible the NSA is making sense of who the enemies might actually be? If they're operating with the same level of proficiency shown by Homeland Security, or Medicare, or the INS, then, no doubt, they're having as many problems identifying them as is the rest of America.
Maybe there are too many culprits. How about narrowing the investigation down to that rather small circle of neocons and administration officials who're systematically ruining this once great country? How about working this like they do in the private sector and going after the people at the top and clearing house? Then we'll have more time to go after all those other fascists. Is that impossible?