Dear Friend and Reader:
Holy Mercury Station Retrograde, Batman.
What every pundit from here in San Francisco to The New York Times could try to say about Flight 253, also known in these parts as the Underwear Bomber event, none could be clearer than Rachel Maddow, with the help of NBC’s foreign correspondent Richard Engel on her primetime MSNBC show “The Rachel Maddow Report.”
In a little under 12 minutes, they set the record straight, explaining many ways in which our “war on terror” is totally misguided. It’s worth the watch; if this is your first experience of Ms. Maddow (who broadcasts nightly on MSNBC), welcome to one of the freshest, most alive and intelligent voices currently on television. (She recently gave Eric her exact chart data, and we will be doing her astrology close to her birthday, which is April 1.)
It was a foregone conclusion on the progressive blogs that once the Northwest Airline event happened, reaction from the Republicans would come like the second shoe dropping. The little noise parade included the timeworn elements of racial profiling, talk of detainment camps and Islamophobia, all of which flourished over the Christmas holiday, the season of Christian peace, joy and harmony. Al-Qaeda could not ask for better irony, but they didn’t get much else; Flight 253 landed on its wheels.