Held Hostage to the Republi-CON Reaction to Nuts

UPDATE II: A great analysis of recent events by Bush's former chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006:

"Since the days of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, radicals have talked of the "propaganda of the deed" -- the use of dramatic, usually violent, acts to inspire the masses and topple the existing order. The method -- targeting symbolic landmarks to create powerful images -- is now familiar. The killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The first World Trade Center attack. The Oklahoma City bombing. And 9/11 itself.

These events required murder and suicide to gain the global media stage. But the Rev. Terry Jones achieved something new, something that will be studied for generations: the propaganda of the idiotic gesture.

This development was made possible by a number of enabling conditions. . ."

Read the remainder of the article at the Washington Post, The Internet: Enabling Pastor Terry Jones and crazies everywhere.


UPDATE: "America was not built on hate." Read The New York Times, Is This America?

From the Washington Post, Nine years after 9/11, let's stop fulfilling bin Laden's goals:

"The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams. . .

In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. "All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."

Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald's. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?"

“Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.”

America is in the hands of angry fools.