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A Grasping, Opportunistic, Dilettante

The 5th anniversary of 9/11 produced some truly stupid editorial comment from the news papers and TV programs. Bush's primetime address to the nation, coupled with the "docudrama" The Path to 9/11 triggered waves of Bushcosis among the smarter set. This mental disorder was perfectly illustrated in the NYTimes editorial page of the Sept. 12th paper* with an editorial entitled "President Bush's Reality" making the point that his "reality" is not real, another editorial entitled "The Fictional Path to 9/11" that defended the Clinton years and chastised the filmmakers for making a movie that didn't fit the Time's understanding of reality, another editorial entitled "From Sacristy to Lockup" where the times laments the "ghostly legion of fallen priests" (I'm sure Pinch Sulzberger can hardly sleep at night over this), and finally an editorial endorsing candidates for the New York Dem. Primary where they supported Mark Green for attorney General. On the Op-Ed page the Times had two columns attacking the Bush administration for their unreal worldview. One of them by John Tierny claimed that UBL must be laughing because he had won the PR war and the other by Nick Kristof told President Bush that he better not attack Iran because it will (get a load of this) help Iran's leaders "stay in power for more than another decade." I'm reading this thinking a) tell that to Saddam and b) how in the hell can we live with Iran's leaders for another 10 month to say nothing of a decade. Kristof is worried about the Iranian elections of 2016!!! But the best part of the entire Time's Bushcosis was the piece on the Op-Ed page squeezed between all the crap I've just reviewed - it was entitled "The Apocalypse Will be Blogged" and it was made of the blog postings from organizations sympathetic with UBL and the 9/11 bombings. These postings from that "reality" that the editors of the Time's find so unreal made a joke of the high minded editorials and Op-Ed's that surrounded it.

*As long time readers of the KOTCB blog know - I do not buy the New York Times, but I was on the shuttle between DC and NYC on 9/12 and picked up the paper "for free" at the LGA terminal.

I had thought that the NYTimes Editorial/Op-Ed page was the most compelling example of Bushcosis on display during the week of 9/11 (always a good bet) but then I came across Keith Olbermann's video editorial on 9/11 where he scolded GWB for his many transgressions and ended his diatribe with the rhetorical plea, "may this country forgive you." It is truly one of the most unhinged examples of Bushcosis I've ever seen or read (there must be something in the water over at MSNBC) and it is also one of the most adolescent. His key historical reference for the current terror that the Bush junta is inflicting on the good people in the news media is an episode from The Twilight Zone that explores the use of fear as a tool of warfare as practiced by extra terrestrials on simple minded suburban Americans. It speaks volumes about Olbermann that his deep thinking goes only as deep as his childhood TV watching - but what do you expect from a TV talking head. Still, his comments below show such a lack of self knowledge that only by reading the text in full and imagining how easily they could be spoken by George Bush about Olbermann can you really understand how foolish this "news man" can be.

"And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

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